


ripped life slipping away (maybe you could make it out with just a little bit of grace)

by elsaclack



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, Alvin Marsh is His Own Warning, Canon-Typical Homophobia, Canon-Typical Profanity, Canon-Typical Racism, Canon-Typical Violence, Eddie Kaspbrak Lives, Eddie Kaspbrak Loves Richie Tozier, Fix-It, Gay Eddie Kaspbrak, Gay Richie Tozier, Gen, M/M, Richie Tozier Loves Eddie Kaspbrak, Slow Burn, Sonia Kaspbrak's A+ Parenting, Stanley Uris Lives, Temporary Character Death, The Turtle CAN Help Us (IT), tags will be updated as necessary
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-09
Updated: 2021-02-25
Packaged: 2021-03-12 20:46:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 67,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28641690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elsaclack/pseuds/elsaclack
Summary: In darkest depths is where It crept, by darkest night It strikes Its plight.  Hope grows thick where sun hangs high; fret not, dear children, Its end is nigh.
Relationships: Ben Hanscom & Eddie Kaspbrak, Ben Hanscom/Beverly Marsh (minor), Bill Denbrough & Eddie Kaspbrak, Eddie Kaspbrak & Beverly Marsh, Eddie Kaspbrak & Richie Tozier, Eddie Kaspbrak & Stanley Uris, Eddie Kaspbrak & The Losers Club, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Mike Hanlon & Eddie Kaspbrak, Patricia Blum Uris/Stanley Uris (minor), bill denbrough/beverly marsh (minor) (temporary)
Comments: 31
Kudos: 42





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Okay take 2:
> 
> This is an AU I've been working on since November and I finally have reached the point where I am too excited about it to not start posting. The fic has not been completed just yet, but I do have several chapters already written and ready to post, so I'm hoping that by posting the first chapter I'll be even more excited about working on it than I already am! :)
> 
> This is a canon-divergent AU, but most of the actual plot will mirror what happens in both IT and IT Chapter 2. Please be aware that I joined this fandom after reading the book, and I do plan to include a lot of the book's canon material - primarily where Mike is concerned. Otherwise, it should mirror the plots from both movies. Heed the tags! This is a fix-it AU and I will tell you upfront that both Eddie and Stan WILL make it to the end of this fic alive! Aside from Georgie and the various other victims of IT, there will be no character deaths :)
> 
> Alright I think that's everything - enjoy!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The source of the glow is easy to spot, but the longer Eddie stares at it, the less he understands. He’s pretty sure it isn’t a nuke - he’s seen grainy pictures on the news, in the brief moments his mother pauses between flipping channels after dinner. But in all honesty, he has absolutely no idea what it is. It - it’s shifting, almost alive, like it can’t quite settle into one shape for longer than half a second. Eddie can feel his mind skittering as he stares, trying and failing to wrap around what he’s seeing; he shifts closer to the edge, leaned forward, fingers curled around the safety railing, squinting hard enough that a headache kicks up faintly in his temples.
> 
> And from his pocket, his inhaler slips and lands against the catwalk beneath him with a deafening clatter. The sound echoes spectacularly in the cavernous cylinder, dragging on for what feels like hours, and the green mass - he thinks it’s green, but in this wild panic he’s suddenly not even sure of that - it looks at him. There are no eyes, there is no face, but instinctively Eddie knows he’s been spotted.
> 
> He leaves his inhaler on the catwalk.

It happens on their first - and only - trip to the Standpipe on Kansas Street.

It’s dubious, at best, the whole concept of whether or not they’re technically allowed to be there. The Standpipe sits at the far edge of a public park, after all, at the end of a dirt path that winds through the trees, past a stone birdbath and several wooden benches - charming, in a small town Maine kind of way. Eddie’s heard they sometimes open the building up to tours - whoever _they_ are (and _why_ anyone would want to take a tour of the _Standpipe_ , of all things, is completely beyond him, but...he digresses).

The large _KEEP OUT_ sign posted above the doorway lends itself to a less than welcoming aura in spite of its otherwise pleasant surroundings.

“I heard there are still kids trapped swimming in there _to this day_ ,” Richie says excitedly, striking out ahead of Eddie, long legs bounding down the path. To Eddie’s right, he sees the shape of Bill’s face contorting in a confused frown, directed at Richie; to Eddie’s left, he hears Stan swallow thickly.

It’s nearing sunset now, and despite that afternoon’s unseasonably warm weather, April’s keen chill is already curling long, icy fingers around the back of his neck. Eddie clenches his fists against a shiver, focusing instead on the thrill of freedom singing in his veins. It’s never often or easy, convincing his mother that it won’t actually be the end of the world if he spends the night at the Denbrough’s house with Stan (he learned early on to gracefully refrain from mentioning Richie’s name when negotiating) so, really, he should be enjoying the _hell_ out of this. They’re set to finish the fifth grade in a few short weeks, and then he’ll be a sixth grader, and everyone knows that sixth graders are basically invincible.

Sixth graders are invincible, so Eddie agreed when Richie demanded they forgo the familiar Barrens to explore the Standpipe, since Richie’s dad told him all about it the night before and Richie hadn’t shut up about it all day. Eddie agreed because sixth graders are invincible and he’s pretty sure he’d rather die than chicken out in front of Bill.

Eddie agreed, but as the spire of sun-bleached concrete begins to take shape through the thinning trees, jutting up to tower silent and menacing above his head, he finds himself wishing he never bothered asking to spend the night at the Denbrough’s to begin with.

Though it had been well over 50 years since the Standpipe last served as Derry’s main source of water, its reputation is still well-known throughout town. Eddie did a whole project on it once for his third grade history class, spending days in the Derry Public Library combing through old newspaper clippings while his mother distractedly flipped through the magazines near the entrance. Kids _died_ in there - kids not much younger than he is now, who found themselves at the very top of the inner sleeve inside the Standpipe, who shuffled just a little too close to the precarious edge of the landing, who slipped and fell into standing water and had no way to get back to that ledge, who swam and swam and swam until their bodies gave out and they went still, face-down in the water.

Stan’s face has taken on an ashen grey pallor since they first arrived and parked their bikes at the other end of the park ten minutes ago, Eddie notes as they slowly make their way down the path. Stan’s fists are clenched at his sides, his eyes wide as he follows the shape of the tower up toward the sky. It honestly makes Eddie feel a little better about his own pounding heart threatening to burst from his chest and the vice squeezing tighter around his throat with each step forward. He considers reaching out to touch Stan’s wrist - they do that for each other sometimes, just a brief, grounding squeeze when the other seems moments away from floating off into space - but Richie’s elbowing past him before he can.

“ _Watch_ it, numbnuts!” Eddie snaps, touching the spot on his upper arm already smarting from Richie’s boney elbow.

Richie ignores him, darting closer to the base of the Standpipe, leaping up the three steps at the end of the path to the narrow landing before the closed front door. “I heard the Russians stored all their nukes in the inner sleeve during the Cold War, and they’re _still_ in there!” he shouts, voice echoing harshly as he bounces on the balls of his feet.

“H-how can there s-stuh-hill be kids s-swimming in there if it’s f-full of R-Ruh-Russian n-nukes?” Bill asks, a grin just blossoming in the cheerful crinkles around his eyes.

Richie grins, too - an unsettling, Cheshire echo. “Let’s fuck around and _find out_.”

He whirls around and yanks on the doorknob, and before Stan can so much as hiss Richie’s name, the door swings open and Richie’s lanky form is framed by a gaping maw of pitch blackness. Eddie swallows thickly, suddenly remembering one of the words from their spelling test earlier that day: _abyss_.

Fear swoops low at the base of his spine.

“Whoa,” Richie breathes into the abyss, taking a faltering step backwards, as if uncertain in the face of his impulsive decision making coming to an immediate fruition before his eyes. “It’s - it’s actually open.”

“We can _see_ that, Captain Obvious,” Eddie mutters, stealing forward to seize Richie’s wrist and drag him down the steps. “Get away from there -”

Richie guffaws, apparently already over his initial shock. “Why?” he asks, digging his heels in at the base of the stairs so that Eddie’s forced to stop in his tracks, too. “You scared of the dark, Eds?”

Stan and Bill are still loitering several paces away, perfect pictures of uncertainty, but the sudden irritation fluttering hot and unpleasant in his gut erases them from Eddie’s peripheral. “No, I’m not scared of the _dark_. We’re not supposed to _be here_.”

“ _Oh_ ,” Richie taunts, “you’re scared Mrs. K’s gonna find out, huh? Don’t worry, Eddie baby, I _promise_ I won’t mention it during our pillowtalk tonight -”

“I’m gonna - fucking - _kill you_ -” Eddie punctuates each word with a hard punch to Richie’s upper arm, which almost immediately devolves to a slap-fight right there at the base of the Standpipe. He forgets about the doorway, about the abyss, about the disquieted fear still roiling somewhere below his tummy - all he knows is familiar, exhausting hostility, egged on by the smug grin currently threatening to split Richie’s face clean in half.

Bill forces his way between them, grimacing when Eddie accidentally smacks him right in the center of his chest. “W-will you guys c- _cuh-hut it out_?” he mutters over Eddie’s frantic apology, reaching out to swat Richie’s arm when Richie tries to reach around him to get at Eddie again. He bites down on the inside of his cheek as he turns his head back toward the open doorway, and Eddie follows his gaze, uneasy once more. “W-what do you g-guys think is in th-there?”

Eddie feels Stan’s presence at this other side, the heat of his belly brushing against Eddie’s forearm. Blindly, Eddie reaches back; Stan’s trembling, clammy fingers close over Eddie’s palm and squeeze.

Richie breaks the billowing silence. “Well, since _I’m_ not a total chicken shit, I’m gonna go inside and check it out.” He starts forward, shoulders squared, and this time Bill helps Eddie yank Richie backwards before Richie makes it to the second step.

“Richie, _don't!_ ” Eddie cries shrilly as Richie totters back to solid earth. “It’s pitch black in there and you’re already blind with the lights _on!_ What happens when you get in there and your glasses fall off?”

“They’re not gonna _fall off_ -”

“They fall off like seventeen times every _day_ , they’re _gonna fall off!_ ”

Richie pouts, briefly touching the corner of his glasses held together by the same frayed medical tape currently coiled in Eddie’s fanny pack. “Only ‘cause they’re broken,” he mumbles, fingering the tape, and Eddie rolls his eyes. Richie’s eyes flash suddenly, his pout evaporating as quickly as it materialized, and Eddie immediately feels his heart sink. “Alright, spaghetti man, if you’re so worried about me, _you_ should go in there and find a lightswitch.”

Richie’s grin is sly and taunting, daring in a way Eddie knows is meant specifically to rile him up. “ _Me?_ ” Eddie half-shrieks anyways. “Why _me?_ ”

“I _just said_ , ‘cause _you_ won’t let me go in there! Also, _you’re_ the one who wanted to go down to the Barrens to play guns earlier - what’s so different about playing in the Standpipe?”

Eddie gestures to the keep out sign, hand flat and fast as it chops through the air. “First of all, the Barrens is, like, public property - the Standpipe is _private_ property, right?” Eddie whirls around to Stan, who shrugs, eyes wide. “It _is_ , it’s private property and I’m not getting thrown in _jail_ because _you_ want to _explore_. It’s - whatever, it’s different, okay? It just is.”

Richie snorts, and the nasal sound ignites a flare of irritation in Eddie’s chest. “If it _is_ private property, they should’a locked the door to actually keep people out. C’mon, Eds,” he urges, “it’s not that bad, see? The door’s been open for, like, five whole minutes now, and nothin’s come crawlin’ out yet. Just go see if there’s a lightswitch inside or somethin’, then we can all go inside - I bet we could figure out a way to get up to that catwalk balcony thingy way up at the top -”

It would be so much easier to say no, Eddie thinks, if it was _Stan_ trying to convince him. Probably Bill, too - but then again, neither Stan nor Bill would ever try to convince him to go inside to begin with. Stan and Bill would accept Eddie’s no without question. Stan and Bill were perfectly content with the idea of going down to the Barrens earlier. Stan and Bill don’t partake in violent slap-fights when arguments get a little too heated and words too hard to find. Stan and Bill listen thoughtfully when Eddie starts talking too fast, and they never, _ever_ argue or make jokes about Eddie, or Eddie’s mom.

“Eds,” Richie whines - _Stan and Bill don’t call him stupid nicknames_ \- and Eddie huffs, arms crossed defiantly over his chest. “ _Please_.”

“ _Quit calling me Eds_ , Rich, you _know_ I _hate_ that. I don’t wanna go inside. I won’t do it.”

“Spaghetti sauce, you’re _killing me_ , it’s just gonna be for a second and we’re gonna be right here the _whole time_ -”

Eddie lets out a strangled growl, almost missing Stan muttering something that sounds like _yeah right, Trashmouth._ “ _I don’t wanna do it_ , Rich -”

“Chicken.”

Eddie clenches his jaw as Richie raises both arms, hands tucked up into his armpits to mimic chicken wings. He starts flapping his elbows, scraping his foot through the dirt, bobbing his head, and clucking - and if it doesn’t just add insult to injury, the fact that Richie’s chicken impression is actually half-way _decent_. “C-c’ _mon_ , Richie,” Bill chides as Eddie fumes, swatting lightly at Richie’s elbow. “L-leave Eddie alone. L-l-let’s just go to the B-Barrens. We still got t-time before my parents get home.”

Eddie inhales twice through his nose, sharp little bursts of air that punch something like spiteful courage up near his heart as he watches Richie bob his head and cluck. “ _Fuck you_ , Tozier,” he finally mutters, turning on his heel and marching toward the open doorway.

Richie lets out a victorious whoop; it hits Eddie like a lightning bolt directly to his spine, that courage burgeoning around his heart now zinging through the tips of his fingers. He stomps up the three steps and crosses the narrow walkway with his fists clenched at his sides, determinedly ignoring Richie vibrating with excitement to his left and the long-suffering sigh from Stan somewhere behind them. He falters at the threshold, flexing his fingers.

He stands there at the mouth of the abyss for a long moment, straining to see through the blackness stretching on around the doorframe. It is still and silent before him, not a single mote of dust stirring, and Eddie swallows thickly. How many kids died here, again? Three? Four?

 _That was years ago_ , he thinks. _They drained all the water in the sixties. You saw the pictures. It’s not dangerous anymore. They wouldn’t let people go on tours if it was still dangerous._

“I’m just gonna check the wall for a lightswitch,” Eddie says, voice tight. “You better leave the door open the whole time, Richie. I’m not joking.”

Richie raises his hand in a three-finger salute, his face uncharacteristically, disarmingly solemn. “Scout’s honor, boyo,” he says, and through Eddie’s quivering nervousness, he finds it in himself to roll his eyes. Richie cracks a grin, dropping the façade and his hand immediately, pushing Eddie closer to the door by his shoulders. “C’mon, _c’mon_ , go find the switch!”

Eddie huffs out another indignant breath - steeling himself. He turns back toward the doorway, screws his eyes shut, and steps over the threshold.

For one long, endless moment, nothing happens. He blinks his eyes open, finding himself standing in a narrow rectangle of faded sunlight pouring in from behind him, illuminating an unremarkable, dusty concrete floor and a crooked chink of wall directly opposite of where he stands. Sounds from outside are muted in here, and when he exhales, it sounds like rushing wind in his ears.

And then the door slams shut behind him.

His pulse is instantly screaming in his ears, but over it, he catches the muffled sound of Richie’s cackle. “ _Richie!_ ” Eddie shrieks as he scrambles backwards in the darkness, fists and elbows slamming into the worn wood of the door.

“ _Richie!_ ” Bill’s indignant voice reaches him through his panic. “Open the door!”

“Oh, relax! _Relax_ ,” Richie chortles, “it was just a _joke, jeeze_.”

Eddie flattens both hands against the door, forcing himself to focus on evening out his breathing as the metallic sounds of hands rustling on the doorknob fill the silence. It jiggles a few times, pauses, and then jiggles a few times more.

“Uh,” Richie grunts.

“Open the door,” Eddie says, voice humiliatingly thick.

“I - it’s, it’s... _stuck_.”

Eddie inhales sharply through his nose. If his face flushes maroon - if a painful knot of tears lodges in his throat and spews down his face - that’s between Eddie and the darkness.

“You’ve gotta be joking, Richie,” Stan mutters - angrily, Eddie thinks faintly as he turns his back to the door and quickly sinks down to the floor.

There’s more metallic jiggling over his head, another loud grunt. “ _Fuck!_ ” Richie curses. “Bill, can -”

The jiggling continues, and Eddie brings his knees up to his chest, eyes squeezed shut at the slow-but-steady closing of his throat. Violently, numbly, he wrenches his inhaler from his pocket and deploys it a few times, wincing at the battery acid flavor coating his throat as it forcibly works the muscles open from the pinprick to which they contracted. He can hear himself wheezing, now, and he jams the heel of his palm against one eye as he deploys his inhaler again.

“Shit, _fuck!_ ” Richie shouts. “Eds - Eddie, I’m so sorry, the fuckin’ door is jammed - are you okay?”

Richie sounds frantic, and the sadistic part of Eddie still intact preens at the sound of his distress. “Whaddya _think?_ ” Eddie wheezes.

“Eddie, do you have your inhaler with you?” Stan asks calmly.

Eddie deploys it one more time, biting down hard enough his teeth feel like they’re creaking in his skull. “Yeah,” he chokes, squeezing his shaking fingers around the brittle plastic tightly.

“Okay,” Stan sounds relieved. “It’s gonna be fine. We’re gonna figure something out, okay? We’re - Bill and I are gonna go see if we can find something to break the door with, and Richie’s gonna stay here with you. Unless - can you see if there’s something blocking the door on your side? Maybe something fell when it slammed closed -”

“I literally cannot see my own hand, Stanley.”

The sound of a quiet scuffle reaches him through the door, a _thwap_ followed by an _ow_ that sounds suspiciously like someone - Stan, probably - smacking Richie upside the head. “Just stay where you are,” Stan says, “we’ll be back soon.”

Eddie hears footsteps crunch through the dirt path, quickly fading away into silence. The door vibrates against Eddie; he feels something solid slide down the door on the other side, and a hollow _thunk_ , and he has a sudden, unbidden image of Richie sprawled out on that narrow walkway outside, in a similar - if less tightly-wound - position as Eddie’s. “I’m so sorry, Eddie,” Richie mumbles, barely audible.

Slowly, Eddie lets the muscles in his legs relax, sliding his feet across the floor and straightening his knees. “Fuck you, Richie,” Eddie mutters without any heat.

Richie huffs out a bark of a laugh - devoid of any humor. “Yeah,” he says, “fuck me.”

Eddie lets that sit for a moment. “I actually - _am_ afraid of the dark,” he finally says.

The confession feels a little aimless, but something in Eddie’s brain snaps to attention at the sharp intake of breath he hears through the door. “Fuck, Eddie, I’m - goddammit, are you okay? I’m so fucking sorry, I shouldn’t’ve -”

“It’s okay,” Eddie interrupts - that sadistic part of his brain feels long-dead, suddenly. “It’s not so bad, now that I’m not, uh - now that I’m kinda getting used to it. It’s - I mean, you’re a real jerk for tricking me, but, uh, it’s - it’s not like you, y’know, locked me in here on purpose. You - you didn’t lock me in here on purpose, did you?”

“No!” Richie cries. “Fuck, of _course_ not, I was just - I thought it’d be a funny prank, y’know? And, like, I thought I’d just slam it on you for a second and then open it back up and you’d come flying out and try to murder me again, right? And then later - I just thought, I thought it’d be a good chuck later, is all. Went and Mags are always harpin’ on me about, like, _consequences_ and shit, but I didn’t think - I’m just really, _really_ fucking sorry, Eddie.”

Eddie lets his head fall back against the door softly, smiling a little in spite of himself. “Lazy prank, dipshit,” he mutters, and Richie laughs, bright in a way that feels like Eddie startled it out of him. The darkness doesn’t feel so impenetrable now; he’s pretty sure he can make out the rough shape of the staircase rising in a graceful spiral off to his left, and the solid wall he’d caught a scant glimpse of earlier rising up directly in front of him. “We’ll prob’ly still get a good chuck out of this later,” he says, pointing his toes toward the wall. “Me, Bill, and Stan, I mean. After your funeral. ‘Cause I’m definitely murdering you the second I get outta here.”

Richie’s laugh is loud and appreciative, head bouncing off the door hard enough that Eddie feels it vibrate through his own skull. “Spaghetti man gets off a good one,” he sighs. “You doin’ okay in there?”

Eddie makes a noncommittal sound in his throat, turning his head to the right. He’s pretty sure there’s another wall there, almost close enough to touch, and a darker rectangular shape mounted a few feet above his head that might be a bulletin board.

“You still looking for a lightswitch? Maybe if you can find one, you can see if there’s something blocking the door on your side.”

“I never _started_ looking for a lightswitch,” Eddie mutters. He can make out the shape of the banister now, too, screwed into the wall above the staircase, rising parallel up and out of sight around the distant bend. “I can - I mean, I can’t _see_ , but - I think I can kinda - maybe -”

He gets to his feet slowly, left hand pressed to the door all the while. He fumbles along the wall immediately to the right of the door and is met with cool, rough, uninterrupted concrete; he finds the same immediately to the left of the door. He turns, hand still pressed to the wood, and eyes the staircase curiously.

It’s odd - he’s overcome with a sudden, burning desire to climb.

“Eds?” Richie calls.

“I can’t find a lightswitch, but I can kinda see the stairs,” Eddie says, shuffling toward the staircase cautiously, feet barely leaving the floor between steps. “There might be a switch up the staircase a little, I’m gonna check.”

“Is it safe?”

Eddie scoffs. “We’re _well_ past that now, Tozier.”

He smirks at the mental image of Richie grimacing. “Just - Eddie, seriously, be careful, yeah? If anything happens to - like, if Bill and Stan get back, and you’re - just, just _please_ be careful, Eds.”

“It’s a _staircase_ , Richie, it’s not gonna kill me,” Eddie snaps, ignoring the part of his brain unhelpfully rifling through statistics on stair-related accidental injuries and deaths. “I’m just looking for a lightswitch. I’ll be right back.”

If Richie responds, it’s lost to the loud, foreboding creak of rusted metal beneath Eddie’s feet. He eases his way up slowly, pocketing his inhaler, his hand hovering an inch above the rough, splintered banister, eyes trained upward.

He figures out pretty quickly that there is no lightswitch along the staircase, either.

The urge to climb grows stronger with each step up - along with the faint light emanating from somewhere at the top of the staircase.

On that rebellious evening in April, for reasons Eddie will never be able to fully explain, he climbs to the very top of the Standpipe.

It isn’t a particularly tall staircase - not specifically difficult to climb - but Eddie’s still wheezing by the time he makes it to the top. The dim light is enough to ground him to reality; he forgoes his inhaler in favor of pausing with his hands on both knees, studying the patterned metal beneath his feet as his heart rate evens out and his pinprick of an airway relaxes in his throat and his lungs quit tying themselves in knots. Details come swimming into focus as he slowly straightens up, thrown into sharp relief thanks to the dim light. The catwalk is narrow, lined on the right side with a series of doors that lead into the inner sleeve, and dotted on the left with the door that leads out to the observation deck Richie mentioned when they first arrived. Years ago, when Eddie was _really_ young and still reeling from his father’s sudden passing, his senile grandfather told him wheezing stories about taking girls up here and necking with them when he was Eddie’s age - whatever _that_ means.

(He found the whole thing rather funny, in a vaguely horrifying way, until his mother swept him out of his grandfather’s hospital room and threatened him within an inch of his life right there in the emergency room hallway if he ever so much as _thought_ about going near the Standpipe. “It’s _dangerous_ , Eddiebear,” she’d hissed, pinching his ear. “Only tweakers and fags go there, now. It’s much too dangerous for a fragile little boy like you.”

 _Well, ha-fuckin’-ha, ma. Who’s fragile now?_ )

There is a certain base appeal to the idea of trying the doorway to the left. What an excellent chuck _that_ would be, traipsing out on the deck, ignoring the chill in the air as he shouts down to Richie. Watching and laughing and waving while Bill and Stan break the door down and race inside, Richie clumsily nipping at their heels. Looking so, _so_ cool sitting out on the catwalk, legs fearlessly dangling over the ledge as Bill, Stan, and Richie storm up the stairs and burst through the doorway in a tumbling heap of limbs and echoing shouts.

He almost does it.

The light pulses soft and green from one of the doors to the right, cracked open just wider than the width of his palm. He stares at it for a long moment, gaze darting between it and the door to the left, and he’s seized with that same curious urge from the base of the stairs. To look. To seek.

He’ll never be able to explain why he climbed to the top of the Standpipe. He’ll never be able to explain why he chose the door to the right, either.

Richie was wrong. It’s the first thing he consciously thinks when he eases his way past the door and into the inner sleeve. Richie was _wrong_ \- about the kids still swimming, and about the Russian nukes. The light feels blinding from where Eddie’s crouched down on the catwalk, pulsing brighter toward the bottom of the inner sleeve several hundred feet below him, but already he can see that the inner sleeve is otherwise completely empty. Slowly, carefully, Eddie eases forward and peers over the edge of the catwalk.

The source of the glow is easy to spot, but the longer Eddie stares at it, the less he understands. He’s pretty sure it isn’t a nuke - he’s seen grainy pictures on the news, in the brief moments his mother pauses between flipping channels after dinner. But in all honesty, he has absolutely no idea what it is. It - it’s shifting, almost _alive_ , like it can’t quite settle into one shape for longer than half a second. Eddie can feel his mind skittering as he stares, trying and failing to wrap around what he’s seeing; he shifts closer to the edge, leaned forward, fingers curled around the safety railing, squinting hard enough that a headache kicks up faintly in his temples.

And from his pocket, his inhaler slips and lands against the catwalk beneath him with a deafening clatter. The sound echoes spectacularly in the cavernous cylinder, dragging on for what feels like hours, and the green mass - he thinks it’s green, but in this wild panic he’s suddenly not even sure of _that_ \- it _looks_ at him. There are no eyes, there is no face, but instinctively Eddie knows he’s been spotted.

He leaves his inhaler on the catwalk.

The wall opposite is just as rough and unforgiving beneath his palms as it was downstairs when Eddie slams against it, narrowly missing crushing his own nose. He’s already barreling down the stairs before he can process any of it, labored gasps wheezing through his throat and shrieking in his ears. Light - bright and blazing, inescapable - is roaring up behind him, blinding like a wildfire, and Eddie releases a scream deep and primal when splinters split the pads of his fingertips on the banister. It - whatever it is - is gaining on him, somehow all-encompassing but utterly silent in its pursuit. Eddie’s ankle rolls on the edge of a step and he goes down _hard_ , eyes screwed shut, jaw slamming up against the unforgiving edge of a step hard enough that the metallic taste of blood fills his mouth - from his tongue, or the insides of his cheeks, or his teeth knocked loose in his skull. Momentum carries him tumbling down several more steps, head smacking hard against the curved concrete wall, but even through the blinding pain and the stars bursting behind his eyelids he can feel the way his heaving body is already half-engulfed by the light. He gasps through the blood, hands swatting blindly, white-hot terror consuming all other rational thought. A frightened canary has taken residence in his ribcage, fluttering madly where his heart once beat, as the light swallows him whole.

The first thing that breaks through the resounding darkness is the distant, muffled sounds of his friends at the door. Eddie blinks his eyes open slowly - registering belatedly that the light has gone, and he’s bathed in darkness once more. The pounding down below is even and rhythmic, not a hint of real panic evident, and it’s the only thing keeping his breath dragging in and out of his lungs. He’s laying face-down on the staircase, head elevated above his feet, soaked in sweat. His hands tremble along the step jutting into his stomach, and his elbows immediately give beneath his weight, sending him crashing down from the half-inch of height he manages to push himself up to. His brain feels sluggish, but alight with lingering pulses of fear he does not completely understand. He sucks in a deep breath through his nose and gags at the overwhelming stench of mildew and decay.

Shots of pain are registering throughout his body now, throbbing in his ankle and smarting in the pads of his fingers, aching and nauseating in his head. Violently, he trembles, tremors rocking mercilessly down his spine. He lets out a moan, quiet and choked, wincing at the sharp protest in the muscles of his neck when he tries to lift his head.

A particularly loud _thump_ , followed by a strangled, frustrated shout, brings his focus back down to a pinpoint. His friends are downstairs. Fresh air is downstairs. First aid is downstairs.

“ _Richie!_ ” a muffled, disembodied voice shouts.

Staticky panic immediately fills his brain, blocking out the pain of wrenching himself upright and clambering to his unsteady feet. The smell of this place is overwhelming, sharp and cloying down his throat, and Eddie almost collides with the wall in his haste to turn himself and start back down the stairs. Something foreign is unfurling around his heart, desperate and cleaving, scratching madly at his bones. _There are kids still trapped swimming in there to this day,_ Richie said outside, and as Eddie hobbles as quickly as he can through the darkness down the rest of the stairs, he’s certain he can feel them right behind him, their ghostly water-bloated fingers brushing frigid along the back of his neck.

He stumbles again on the last few steps, overshooting the landing and crashing into the bulletin board with his shoulder curved forward and in like a linebacker breaking through a line of scrimmage. The banging sounds on the door suddenly cease, the male voices only just now audible pause, and Eddie shoves himself off the bulletin board as Richie calls, “Eddie?”

“Open the door!” Eddie screams, ragged, pouding the flats of his hands against the wood. “Open the goddamn door, _right now!_ ”

“We’re trying, we’re _trying -_ ” Richie cries as the pounding sound resumes at a decidedly more frantic rhythm than before, now a direct reflection of Eddie’s own infectious terror.

Blood still pours from Eddie’s lips, dripping down his chin, catching sharp in his windpipe with each labored breath in, but Eddie ignores it. He coughs and spits and slams the heels of his palms against the fine, spattered droplets soaking into the grains of wood stripped of varnish before him. “ _Please,_ ” Eddie screams, “ _please open the door! RICHIE, PLEASE!_ ”

Their voices meld together in the haze of Eddie’s panic, lost beneath the roar of his pulse in his ears and the deafening, reverberating echo rising in a steady crescendo, renting through the air. Something colossal and primordial is coming undone at the center of Eddie’s being, shoving harsh against his organs, unfurling sharp and violent like an ancient dragon’s tattered wings; Eddie scrambles back from the door on auto-pilot, flinging himself up the stairs as far as he can, before his vision goes white and his skin splits from the inside.

The next few seconds are a blur - primal winds screaming from the furthest corners of the earth come whipping at the clothes on his body, threatening to suck him up and spit him out again a thousand universes away. The sound is horrible, a dissonant and loud cacophony threatening to lay waste to his eardrums, crashing and exploding and squealing. And the lights - _the lights_ , incendiary and alive, licking like wildfire against his skin.

Despite the chaos, he never loses contact with the solidity of stairs beneath his knees, chin tucked to his chest, arms curled over his head. Eddie can only hope that whatever this is is contained inside the Standpipe - that his friends, wherever they are, are safe. He grits his teeth, grips harshly at his hair, and waits for death to find him.

It never does.

It feels like it lasts hours, but in reality, it’s over in a matter of seconds. His knees ache beneath him as the winds die down, but he recognizes the pain as borne from impact rather than discomfort. His head lifts slowly from the shelter of his stiff, trembling fingers.

Tangerine sunlight is dappling down through the dusty air, pouring in through the sizable chunk of ceiling missing from the roof over his head. Eddie squints up at it, dazed, numbly bracing his hands on the step above his knees as his spine straightens. The towering concrete wall to his left, between him and the outside world, seems mostly intact. To his right, he can see places where an almost-identical concrete wall is actively crumbling above him. Destruction lies dormant all around him, chunks of concrete as large as boulders having dropped through the staircase spiraling upwards right above him, rendering the metal to little more than twisted, rusted shards. He gulps and pulls his hands down to brace against his knees, gasping through dust-clotted air.

How in the _hell_ did he get inside the Standpipe?

“ _EDDIE!_ ”

Eddie scrambles to his feet at once, desperation steeping every molecule in his body at the anguished, strangled scream from the other side of the door at the base of the stairs, six feet away. He can hear his friends - their choked, desperate voices, cracking and hoarse, indistinguishable aside from the heartbreaking sounds of Richie keening and sobbing high in his throat for some undetermined reason. “ _EDDIE!_ ” Richie screams again, longer and louder than before, as Eddie stumbles over debris and seizes the doorknob and wrenches with all his might.

The door gives immediately, swinging forward onto the landing outside as Eddie stumbles over the threshold and into the light.

He has one half-second to absorb the scene before him: Bill and Stan have their arms wrapped tight around Richie’s torso, red-faced and straining with their efforts to hold him back. Richie, diametrically, looks almost dead for how little color remains in his face, his full body weight thrown forward against Bill and Stan’s arms, seemingly seconds from breaking their grip to fling himself at the door. Their faces are contorted with rage and grief and something else Eddie can’t immediately put a name to, dusty and smudged with dirt save for the near-identical clean paths cutting sharply down their cheeks - _tear tracks_ , he thinks dazedly. Tears appear splattered on Richie’s glasses, too, dripping from the corner of his left lens to dot against his shirt.

He has one half-second to absorb all of this, and then his knees are buckling beneath the weight of Richie’s body slamming against his. He collapses with a groan, pain radiating up to his hips and lower back and down to his ankles on impact, but he hugs Richie back anyways, fingers twisting fiercely into the loose material of Richie’s shirt. He can feel every twitch of Richie’s body, pressed against him like this - the desperate clench of his arms hauling Eddie closer, the dizzying riot of his lungs between his ribs. “ _Holy shit_ ,” Richie heaves in his ear, grip boarding on painful against Eddie’s ribs and shoulder, respectively. “ _Holy fucking SHIT, GOD!_ ”

It’s hard to tell with his face half-buried in the crook of Richie’s neck and his eyes screwed stubbornly shut, but Eddie’s fairly certain it’s Bill who presses in behind him, driving him further into Richie’s arms as he throws his own weight into the hug. And then Eddie’s nearly toppling to his left as Stan drapes himself heavily over the others, his forehead pressed firmly and insistently against Eddie’s temple. Eddie can feel himself crying, but it’s not so bad - Richie, Bill, and Stan are all crying, too, so they probably won’t make fun of him for it later.

He’s pretty sure they would have stayed like that all night, if not for the distant sound of wailing sirens cutting through the air. They scramble to their feet at once, Richie hauling Eddie up and throwing an arm around his shoulders before they race down the steps and onto the dirt path into the trees. Normally, when Richie pulls a move like this, Eddie gripes and complains until Richie gives it up or starts picking on Stan instead; in the growing darkness, through clusters of trees and blooming rose bushes, Eddie lets himself be buffered along, almost savoring the warmth of Richie’s torso against his upper arm.

He’s unstable on Georgie’s bike - borrowed earlier when they left the Denbrough house, because no way in hell would his mother allow him to spend the night _and_ take his bike at the same time - nearly crashing into Stan’s back tire before righting himself and pumping furiously at the pedals. Bill leads the way, a glinting flash of valiant silver in the dusk, and Stan rides to Eddie’s right, between him and the sirens, and Richie stays behind them, whisper-shouting _go, go, go_ over the wind whipping against Eddie’s ears.

Bill’s parents are still gone by the time the boys make it back, their driveway an empty stretch of concrete up to the garage door still standing open from when they left for dinner. Eddie lets Georgie’s bike fall with a clatter on the gentle slope of the Denbrough’s driveway, doubled over with his hands on his knees as he struggles to catch his breath. They’re all breathing hard, really, but Stan still manages his patented pinched worried look, and Bill picks Georgie’s bike up and parks it properly inside the garage without comment, and Richie still looks about three seconds away from straight-up tackling Eddie across the Denbrough’s front lawn in his relief.

Questions - so many questions - rage in a dizzying hurricane in Eddie’s mind. He feels electric with it, like if he starts asking he’ll never ever be able to stop - it’s almost nauseating. Slowly, Eddie straightens up and meets Bill’s sharp gaze. “Mind if I use your shower?” he mumbles.

Eddie tries not to get annoyed when Bill insists on walking him all the way to the bathroom and showing him how to work the shower, even though Eddie’s definitely used the bathroom and even showered there before. _It’s because he’s worried_ , Eddie thinks as Bill twists the knob for hot water, _not because he thinks you’re weak_.

A neatly folded pile of clean clothes greets him from the bench just inside the bathroom door when Eddie emerges through the steam, skin scrubbed pink and raw and blessedly clean. Eddie frowns at them as he towels off his hair - recognizing the patterned pajama bottoms and inoffensive grey t-shirt as his own, and the hideous orange-and-pink flamingo patterned button-up flannel shirt as Richie’s. It might be funny, under normal circumstances, to shrug the flannel on and tuck the too-long tails of it into the pajama pants and strut into Bill’s room with his nose in the air like he’d _chosen_ to wear it.

Eddie only allows himself three seconds to bury his nose in the folds of the shirt and inhale, eyes closed against the familiar scent of pot-pourri, cigarette ash, and Wentworth’s aftershave after he pulls his pajamas on.

Eddie hears the front door open and the sounds of Mr. and Mrs. Denbrough chatting from downstairs as he emerges from the bathroom, Richie’s shirt clutched between his hands. They don’t acknowledge him - probably don’t even notice him - but Eddie still hurries toward Bill’s closed bedroom door, bare feet almost silent on the landing.

Bill, Stan, and Richie are waiting for him. They’re seated in the places they’re going to sleep - Bill elevated on his bed, Stan and Richie on top of their sleeping bags - and Eddie pauses as three pairs of wide, uncertain eyes flick toward him upon slipping through the door. Eddie swallows, but forces himself to close the door and step further into the room anyways, flinging Richie’s shirt at his head as he passes. “I’m not wearing your stupid ugly shirt to sleep,” he mutters, stepping over his and Stan’s legs to lay claim to the last open sleeping bag - the one pressed between Bill’s bed and Stan’s sleeping bag.

(He tries not to think about the fact that they usually fight over this spot.)

Richie’s still scrambling to pull the shirt off of his head when Eddie settles, leaning back against Bill’s bed frame. “Eddie,” Bill murmurs above him as Richie finally surfaces and readjusts his glasses, “what - what the f-f-fuh-huck _happened_ inside the Standpipe?”

Slowly, Eddie turns his head, finding that Bill has shifted to the edge of his mattress. Bill’s face is uncertain, unfamiliar - _solemn_ in a way Eddie’s never seen before, and Eddie’s struck with a sudden image of Bill _older,_ as grown-up as his parents chatting softly downstairs. Eddie’s breath hitches, knees rising up to his chest.

“I - I don’t...know,” Eddie finally says. Bill’s brows knit together, and Eddie turns away, focusing instead on the frayed stitching around the zipper on his sleeping bag. “I just - I remember it being, uh, dark. Really dark. I could hardly see anything.”

Stan shifts beside Eddie, swaying closer, before straightening again. “Eddie,” Stan murmurs, “do you - remember anything? Do you remember what happened to you?”

Eddie frowns. He’d gone over it in his head in the shower, glaring in concentration at the water beading along the tiles as he slowly, meticulously shampooed his hair. All that came to him was overwhelming darkness and the gagging scent of mildew, and maybe - _maybe_ \- the faint echoes of pain and fear.

Stan’s face is carefully blank when Eddie meets his eyes and shakes his head.

Richie makes a quiet, distressed sound in his throat, and Eddie feels Bill shift somewhere behind him, but Stan’s calm gaze does not falter, and Eddie does not look away. “Okay, that’s okay,” Stan says, gentle and quiet, and when Eddie blinks his vision is blurred with tears. “What’s the last thing you do remember? Take your time.”

Eddie nods, quickly swiping the pads of his fingers under his eyes - and a faint spike of pain shoots through the fingers of his right hand with the movement. “I - I think I got hurt,” he says in a voice too loud and foreign to be his own. “But I’m not - I’m not hurt now.”

He pulls his hand away and studies his fingers, finding the skin a little pruney from his shower, but otherwise smooth and uninterrupted. Stan leans forward and Eddie turns his hand toward him, showing him, like Stan will be able to see something Eddie can’t. “Okay,” Stan says again - trepidation crumbling the edges of his voice. “Do you remember anything else? Anything about going up the stairs?”

The echo of a loud, metallic groan fills his ears, the phantom of shifting ground beneath his feet weakening his knees. “I did go upstairs, didn’t I?” Eddie asks. “I told - who did I tell?”

“Me,” Richie says, voice hardly cracking a whisper.

Eddie can feel it, now, the way the door vibrated against his skull, the pleasant, familiar laugh that reached him through the wood. “Right,” Eddie breathes. “I told Richie I was looking for a lightswitch.”

“What else, Eddie? What do you remember?”

Eddie closes his eyes, feeling his face contort as he digs through blurry darkness. He can remember the creaks and groans echoing loud and distorted with each uncertain step forward. And the darkness, pressing in on all sides - except forward.

“I went all the way to the top,” he hears himself say. “There was another catwalk up there, and some doors. I went all the way up to the top of the Standpipe.”

A brief, pregnant pause follows. “Why?” Stan asks.

“I don’t know. I just - I just did. I don’t know.”

Stan shifts closer to Eddie, and Eddie tries to shake the hazy feeling clouding his mind. “You said you thought you got hurt,” Stan says, briefly glancing at Eddie’s hands clasped in his lap. “Are you sure you’re okay now? You didn’t - you didn’t _look_ hurt, earlier, but -”

“No, I - I checked in the shower. I’m not, I’m definitely not, but...I just, I feel like I was, at some point, y’know? Like - like I’m gonna wake up sore tomorrow, the way I did after I fell off Silver that one time.”

Stan blinks, face suddenly betraying whatever emotion he’s been concealing - Eddie’s heart jolts at the sight of it, at the bald-faced _fear_ lancing through Stan’s gaze. “Eddie,” Stan murmurs, still just as soft and gentle, “you - you sounded _terrified_ when you got back to the bottom of the staircase. Did you - do you think you saw something, maybe? Like - like -”

Stan falters and doesn’t finish, and when Eddie blinks, hot tears spill down his face. The fear feels less ghostly, now, something more solid and impossible to ignore that rolls heavy and unbidden up his spine and jams in his throat. “I was scared,” he whispers - knowing anything louder will break him. “I - I don’t really remember why, but - I was. I was scared.”

“You - you were in there when - what _happened?_ There was an _explosion_ , for cripe’s sake, how did you - what the hell even happened?”

Eddie huffs, a flash of irritation swelling dully at the base of his skull, but dutifully closes his eyes and tries to recall the memory. The mildew stench - he thinks, somehow, it got stronger after - after _whatever_ happened. He has a distinct impression of a sharp edge pressed against his cheekbone, its siblings lining the soft expanse of his belly and thighs - facedown on the stairs, that’s how he’d woken. The pain was real, then, too, far more substantial than the ghostly tendrils sliding across his joints now. He’d rolled or sprained or broken his ankle, right? Slipping uneven over the edge of a step, tumbling, crashing into the wall, blood dripping from his chin and spewing from his lips, and something - _something_ roaring to life in the cavern of his chest, clawing desperately at his bones.

Eddie presses the palm of his right hand over his eye and exhales, woozy. “I don’t know,” he says again - honest, but it feels like a lie all the same. “I really don’t know. I - I just remember being scared. That’s all.”

“But how could you -”

“S-Stuh-han,” Bill interrupts, low and urgent, “l-let’s - d-dr-drop it for n-now. Whatever h-happened, Eddie’s o-okay. W-we’re _all_ okay. Maybe s-s-sleeping will h-help.”

It feels very much like it isn’t the end of the conversation, based on the uneasy frown creasing Stan’s brow, but they lapse into tense silence all the same; slowly, Eddie crawls into his sleeping bag and shifts to lay on his back, too scared to face either the melancholy glint in Stan’s eyes or the shadowy depths beneath Bill’s bed.

Bill flicks the lamp off, and Eddie listens to Richie, Stan, and Bill all settle through the semi-darkness. Mr. and Mrs. Denbrough are still downstairs, the melody of their voices blending with the familiar sounds of a television rising through the floor beneath Eddie’s head. Across the hallway, Eddie thinks he hears the tiniest billowing sigh from Georgie’s room, deep and secure, and Eddie squeezes his eyes shut at the unfamiliar clenching ache in his chest.

It takes some time - long enough that Bill’s parents finish chatting and turn the television off and climb up the stairs to go to bed themselves - but eventually, both Bill and Stan’s breathing slows and evens out.

Eddie gives it another ten minutes before slowly and carefully sitting up in his sleeping bag. Stan is definitely asleep, his mouth slightly agape where he’s half-smushed into his pillow, and though Bill’s back is turned to Eddie, Eddie can clearly see the steady rise and fall of his breathing beneath his quilted comforter. He exhales through his nose, letting his shoulders slump in relief.

Richie’s also got his back to Eddie on Stan’s other side, but Eddie knows immediately that he’s still awake. It’s in the suspicious lack of faint snoring - even in sleep, Richie has to make noise - and it’s in the tense, shallow way his side moves as he breathes beneath his sleeping bag. Eddie arches an eyebrow at the glasses folded neatly to the left of Richie’s clenched fist, before crawling down the length of his sleeping bag.

Richie turns his head and squints at him as he hauls himself up to his feet with a hand on Bill’s footboard. His expressive brow is furrowed, lips pulled down in a frown, and Eddie has a sudden urge to flip him and his stupid, wild curls currently standing on end off. Instead, Eddie picks his way across the room, carefully stepping over both Stan and Richie’s legs, stopping only to grab Richie’s glasses before easing Bill’s bedroom door open and sneaking out into the hallway.

Richie catches up to him before he makes it to the top of the staircase, reaching wordlessly for his glasses and gesturing for Eddie to lead the way downstairs.

It’s a herculean effort, but Eddie manages to not speak until they make it to the kitchen. Light from the streetlight outside pours in fuzzy through the thin kitchen curtains, casting the length of the room in a soft, flickering orange glow; it glances off of Richie’s coke bottle lenses softly, almost obscuring the wide expanse of his baby blue irises when he angles his head down toward Eddie. “I’m okay, Richie,” he whispers, toes curling against the cold tiles as the kitchen door swings shut behind them. “Honestly, I’m fine.”

Richie levels him with a pensive, almost unfamiliar look, before he moves past Eddie and beelines toward the refrigerator. Eddie sits down heavily at the breakfast table, watching as Richie’s face is thrown into intense relief in the harsh fridge lighting, all sharp angles and deep shadows. Richie scans the contents for a long moment, before disappearing behind the open door and emerging a second later with an opened package of Oreos and a half-full gallon of milk gathered against his chest.

Eddie perks up automatically at the sight. He’s not allowed Oreos at home - a rule Richie knows well and regularly goes out of his way to help Eddie break.

Richie pauses to pull two pint glasses out of a cabinet before joining Eddie at the table, arms heavy laden with his bounty. He slides the Oreos toward Eddie without a word, eyes trained steadily on the glasses as he uncaps the milk and pours them both a generous helping. Eddie watches as he pulls the interior plastic sleeve out of the packaging.

Riche slides one of the two glasses toward Eddie and recaps the milk, drumming his fingers along the side of the carton. “I know you’re okay,” he finally says, pushing the milk carton closer to the center of the table and slumping back in his seat to curl his fingers tightly around his own glass. “Like, physically, I can look at you and see that you’re okay. I _know_ you’re okay.”

Eddie plucks an Oreo out of the sleeve and holds it between his teeth, shifting the sleeve closer to Richie before actually biting down. Richie’s eyes flick up to his face, and Eddie nods, hoping he’s conveying whatever it is Richie needs to see.

He must, for Richie nods to himself a moment later, gaze falling back to the Oreo sleeve between them. “It’s just - man, I don’t know. You _shouldn’t_ be okay, y’know? Like - we should’ve been, uh, like - like digging you outta there. You should - I mean, I’m _so fucking_ _glad_ you aren’t, but - you - uh -”

He can’t seem to bring himself to say the words, and Eddie swallows slowly, eyes widening at the distress quickly blooming on Richie’s face. “Rich,” Eddie breathes.

“ _How are you okay, Eds?_ We _heard_ the walls coming down - the ground was shaking like it was a fuckin’ earthquake or something, there was dirt and dust _everywhere_ and - _how?_ ”

Eddie inhales sharply, and something in Richie’s gaze fractures. “I-I don’t - I don’t know,” he says truthfully, dropping the other half of his Oreo on the table to grab the closest part of Richie he can reach - his wrist. “But, hey - I’m okay.”

Richie’s gaze seems transfixed on Eddie’s hand, but only for a moment; Richie covers Eddie’s hand before he can pull away, a faint smile twitching in the apples of his rosy cheeks. “Yeah,” Richie agrees, absently patting Eddie’s fingers as the traces of his smile slowly fade.

“Whatever happened - it wasn’t your fault.”

Richie’s hand falters and pauses, hovering close to Eddie’s, before dropping limply against him. “I mean,” he mumbles, “it - it kinda _was_.”

It’s hard to tell, given the low light, but Eddie’s pretty sure Richie’s eyes are brimming with tears. Eddie edges forward until he’s barely perched to the edge of his seat, tightening his grip on Richie’s wrist. “Not really,” he insists, careful to keep his voice low and even - soothing, or as close of an approximation as he can muster. “It was an accident, yeah? You said so yourself.” Richie reaches with his free hand to shove his glasses up his forehead and scrub his fist against his eye, and Eddie resists the urge to huff impatiently. “You couldn’t’ve known what was gonna happen. It wasn’t your fault, and I’m okay. We’re both okay.”

Richie sniffles hard, still scrubbing his eye. “I’m - I’m really sorry, Eddie, it was such a _stupid_ prank - I swear to god, I’ll never pull a prank again -”

Like a stretched-taut rubber band snapping back into shape, Eddie feels all semblances of patience evacuate his sensibility in the blink of an eye, leaving behind that familiar two-part cocktail of irritation and affection. “Oh, for the love of - Richie, it was a _freak accident!_ _Jesus_ , you can’t - like, eighty percent of your personality is pulling shitty pranks, get a _grip._ You don’t have to swear off _pranking_ , you idiot, just - just stop shoving people into dark buildings and slamming the door on them, maybe? There’s a middle ground here. _God_.”

It’s perhaps a little more snappish than one should be in this situation, but it is apparently what Richie needed to hear - it gets a genuine laugh out of him, albeit a quiet and watery laugh, and he drops his hand back over Eddie’s to let his glasses fall back over his red-rimmed eyes, low over the bridge of his nose. “Fine,” he concedes, “I’ll never slam the door on anyone when they’re in a dark weird building they’ve never been in before ever again.”

“Promise?”

“I swear.”

Eddie eyes him a moment longer, before retracting his hand with a sniff. “Good,” he mutters, shoving the Oreo sleeve closer to Richie. “Eat a cookie.”

“Yessir.”

They empty the sleeve in that flickering orange light, whispering and snickering, and in the morning Bill finds them slumped over the table, fast asleep, Oreo crumbs stuck to their faces and fingers loosely tangled together.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “So,” Eddie says, tearing his eyes away from Stan’s face to glance between Bill and Richie, “remember how I didn’t remember anything that happened to me in the Standpipe?”
> 
> Both Bill and Richie’s expressions darken immediately; Richie seems to freeze up completely, while Bill manages a stiff nod.
> 
> “Right, so - funny thing - I think I might’ve gotten superpowers.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some content warnings for this chapter: Henry Bowers being Henry Bowers, use of a gay slur ("fairies"), and somewhat graphic descriptions of injuries and injury-related blood. If there's anything else I haven't included that you feel should be included, please let me know and I'll gladly add it!

It’s been two weeks since the incident at the Standpipe, and Eddie thinks rather proudly that he’s been doing a good job at not thinking about it. Year-end festivities occupy most of his free time, leaving little room for wandering thoughts and the disjointed nightmares that slip away the moment he wakes. News of the Standpipe’s destruction spread quickly throughout town, but in true Derry fashion, it was forgotten in a matter of days; now the fluttering caution tape barring the front door to prying eyes remains the only physical evidence that anything at all happened within.

Eddie’s grin is bright and blinding when the final bell rings that Friday afternoon, a giggle caught between his fingers at the excitable whooping and hollering from his classmates that drowns the last of the bell out. He darts out of his seat and races down the hallway, mind already completely focused on the disjointed list of movies passed to him during lunch written in Stan's neat scrawl, Bill's messy hand, and Richie’s chicken scratch, currently folded in his front pocket. Bill’s parents are going to a party tonight, and Georgie’s spending the night at Bill’s grandmother's house - they’ll have the house to themselves until well after midnight.

His good mood falters when he rounds the corner to find Stan waiting for him at his locker, alone. Stan levels him with a tight, thin-lipped grimace as Eddie fights the tide of other kids to cut a path toward him. “Bill and Richie got detention,” he says once Eddie’s within earshot. “They got caught passing notes during language arts earlier, and Richie drew a stupid picture of Mr. Smith with tits, and - yeah.”

“Oh, _come on!_ ” Eddie cries, ripping his locker open blindly. “What’re we supposed to do, go to Bill’s house without _Bill?_ ”

Stan shrugs, tossing a careless glance toward the giggling, shrieking girls that scurry past them before turning to face Eddie head-on. Eddie shrugs his backpack off and crouches down beside it, trying to focus on unzipping the zipper and pulling textbooks out and not on the frustration sitting like a knot in his throat. “I was thinking about going home to drop my backpack off,” Stan says, “that way I won’t have to deal with it tomorrow, but -”

“Nuh-uh!” Eddie interrupts loudly from the floor. “No way, I’m not going home! Ma won’t let me leave again if I go back home!”

“- _but_ I figured you wouldn’t want to go home.” says Stan with a knowing smirk.

Eddie rolls his eyes, straightening back up and slamming his locker closed before hefting his significantly lighter backpack over one shoulder. “This _sucks,_ ” he grumbles, glaring at the third button down on Stan’s shirt. “What’re we supposed to do for a whole _hour_ while they're stuck in detention?”

“We could play on the playground,” Stan suggests, gesturing toward the side door at the end of the hallway that leads out to the sprawling playground beyond. Eddie groans and rolls his eyes, leaning back on the cool lockers and leveling his most unimpressed stare at Stan. “C’mon, it won’t be that bad. You could work on doing the monkey bars backwards again. Plus, it’s right there by the doors - we’ll see the second Bill and Richie get out.”

“That’s so lame,” Eddie mutters. “Also, the last time I went on the monkey bars, I had blisters for a week. Ma took me to the ‘mergency room when I picked at one and it started bleeding.”

“Then don’t pick at the new ones.”

Eddie has half a mind to start listing all the different kinds of bacteria that grow on galvanized steel, but Stan’s already walking toward the double doors at the end of the hallway and whistling to himself cheerfully. So Eddie tilts his head back and lets out a short, frustrated growl, before hurrying to catch up.

Warm sunlight greets them the moment they push the doors open, and Eddie pauses there at the top of the stairs. He can feel the warm breath of summer on each refreshing breeze, warmer still in the places light peeks through the trees to caress his face, and he automatically closes his eyes and inhales as deeply as his lungs will allow.

He’s been doing that more lately - stopping and basking in sunlight when and where he can - and only Stan seems to have not only patience and understanding, but mutual _appreciation_ for these little stolen moments of solace. They stand together, motionless on the landing, eyes closed against a breeze that ruffles Eddie’s hair affectionately, basking in comfortable quiet.

“ _Move it!_ ” a harsh voice growls in Eddie’s ear, and before Eddie can even snap his eyes open he’s falling forward, shoved sharply by a pair of unforgiving hands against his shoulders. The force of it sends him sprawling out on the sidewalk leading away from the base of the stairs, most of his weight caught by skidding palms and slamming knees. It shocks every last ounce of fresh air out of his lungs; dazed and breathless, Eddie rolls to his side and squints up as snide, taunting laughter rings out over his head.

He’s greeted by the sight of Henry Bowers smirking down at him from the top of the staircase. Victor Criss chortles over Henry’s right shoulder, and Belch Huggins guffaws over Henry’s left. From his peripheral, Eddie sees Stan staggering to the right, having apparently also been shoved but also managing to catch himself before completely eating concrete like Eddie did. “Next time you block the door like that, I’ll make sure you land on your fuckin’ _heads, fairies_ ,” Henry sneers.

Belch shoves Stan out of the way as they make their way down the steps, and Eddie watches them go through wide eyes. He’s tangentially aware of the fact that his chest is heaving, but it’s little more than a faint warning bell in the back of his mind.

“You okay, Eddie?”

Stan’s voice brings Eddie jolting back to reality; Eddie blinks rapidly as Stan carefully steps in front of him and offers him a hand. He takes Stan’s hand without answering and immediately wrenches away, hissing at the sharp sting in the meat of his palm. “Fuck,” he hisses, “ _fuck_ , I’m bleeding.”

Stan looks down at Eddie’s blood smeared across his palm and carefully curls his fingers over the red, as if hiding it from view. “I think the nurse is still here,” he says calmly. “I can go get her and she can patch you up.”

“Ma’ll kill me,” Eddie whines, cradling both palms in his lap and wincing at the corresponding ache in his knees. “Shit, this whole day just _sucks so much ass_ -”

“Freaking out isn’t gonna help,” Stan says, crouching down in front of Eddie and steadying himself with a grip on Eddie’s shin with his non-blood-stained hand. “We have options, but we gotta make a decision now. I can go inside and get the nurse, or I can patch you up with what you have in your fanny pack, or I can walk you home and your mom can -”

“ _Hell no_ to option three, dude, she’ll put me on house arrest all weekend and probably the whole month of June. _No_.” Eddie vehemently shakes his head, and Stan manages a brief smirk. “I guess - no, okay, no, you should do it. The nurse might call ma, I think she has to if I’m bleeding. You should do it.”

Stan levels him with a hard stare - searching, Eddie realizes. “Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure, I’m not sitting _outdoors_ with open wounds for an _hour_ , and I trust _you_ to do it way more than Bill or Richie anyways, so, yeah. Just do it.”

Stan grimaces, but does not argue as he leans forward to unzip Eddie’s fanny pack. Eddie walks him through what supplies he’ll need, gaze upturned to the sky to avoid the unsettling sight of his tattered skin. Stan takes a deep, steadying breath before wrapping a hand around Eddie’s wrist and pulling Eddie’s hand a little closer. “Okay,” Stan says, “this is the antiseptic stuff, it - it’s probably gonna hurt.”

“Just _do it_ already, Stanley,” Eddie mutters through grit teeth. Stan huffs and inches forward, eyes trained on Eddie’s palm, and Eddie screws his eyes and turns his face away as Stan lifts the uncapped bottle of antiseptic toward Eddie’s hand.

Another breeze kicks up the moment before the antiseptic touches Eddie’s palm, strong enough that Eddie’s pushed forward just slightly with the force of it. He’s braced for the sharp, stinging pain, but what he feels instead is a curious wet sensation, dripping harmlessly from his wrist and the back of his hand. Stan gasps sharply, and Eddie’s eyes spring open.

And together, they stare down at his palm - perfectly smooth and completely intact.

“What the fuck,” Stan chokes, “what - what the _fuck_.”

Eddie lifts his other hand - also smooth - and then leans forward to peek at his knees - unmarred. Not even a trace of blood remains dripping down his legs.

“ _Eddie, what the fuck!_ ”

“I-I don’t - I don’t know! What the fuck!”

“You were _hurt,_ I _saw it,_ I - your blood is still on my hand!”

Stan shoves the palm of his hand under Eddie’s nose, as if Eddie wouldn’t be able to spot the dried smears of deep maroon from any further away. “I can _see_ ,” Eddie hisses, shoving Stan’s hand away. “I don’t - I don’t understand -”

Stan falls backwards from his haunches, landing hard on his butt, wide eyes never leaving Eddie’s face. “You - I - I don’t -”

Eddie rocks forward, gaze darting between his own hands and Stan’s face. “I don’t know what happened,” he says hoarsely, “I don’t understand.”

Stan heaves in three more breaths before startling forward, quickly scrambling up to his feet and yanking Eddie up by his arm. “We need to get away from the door,” he says, jaw stiff. “We need to - just - c’mon.”

Eddie staggers upright and lets Stan frog-march him across the playground with a grip around his wrist, around the swingset and toward the back of the slides. It’s the only sheltered spot on the playground, the divot between the ladders and the underbellies of the slides themselves creating a sort of hollowed out tunnel that hides them from the long outer wall of windows along the side of the school building and the faculty parking lot beside it; Eddie tries not to look up at the crude graffiti littering the sun-warmed slopes of steel over their heads, focusing instead on counting his own heartbeats over their stumbling footsteps crunching through the playground gravel.

Stan whirls around once they’re hidden, his face an unfamiliar mask of determination. “I have a theory,” he says carefully.

Eddie blinks, hands still held out before him even as Stan drops his grip around Eddie’s wrist. “Okay?”

Stan opens his mouth, but closes it again a moment later. They stare at each other for a beat, and then - before Eddie can even process what’s happening - Stan whips his pocket knife from his back pocket and slashes the blade across the outside of Eddie’s extended forearm.

“ _WHAT THE FUCK, STANLEY!_ ”

Stan grimaces, glancing down at his pocket knife like he has no idea how it even got into his hand. Eddie scrambles away, twisting his arm up and gasping at the thin gash splitting his skin. It doesn’t seem too deep, really, but it’s already oozing blood, and the liquid warmth dripping down his elbow twists his gut into nauseating knots. “I’m sorry,” Stan says faintly; he’s paled significantly when Eddie whips his head up again, staring at Eddie’s arm like he’s never seen anything like it before. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what - I just -”

Eddie’s already halfway through shrieking a shrill, near-incoherent response when another strong breeze whistles through their makeshift tunnel. Stan cuts him off with another sharp gasp, and when Eddie twists his arm around to look again, the cut - and the blood - are gone.

“I _knew it_ ,” Stan whispers.

Eddie lets out a shaky breath, staring down at his arm. “Where did it go?”

“It healed. You - you _healed yourself._ ”

Eddie gapes at Stan, closing his palm over his arm. “What?”

“ _Y_ _ou healed yourself_.”

“ _What?_ ”

“I _knew_ it, I _knew_ \- I _knew_ you couldn’t’ve just _not gotten hurt_ in the Standpipe, I _knew_ something weird happened -”

“The - the Standpipe? You think this has something to do with the Standpipe?”

“Not the Standpipe itself - whatever happened when you were trapped in there before. You said yourself that you thought you’d gotten hurt, but when you walked out of there, you were perfectly fine. Not a scratch on you. Eddie,” Stan breathes, “I think you _did_ get hurt, but you healed yourself inside the Standpipe.”

Eddie blinks rapidly. “Are you telling me,” he says slowly, “that you think - you think I - what, you think I have _superpowers_ , or something? You think I can just - just magically heal myself all of a sudden, like - like fuckin’ _Wolverine?_ ”

“I’m saying I _watched_ you heal _extremely quickly_. _Twice._ That’s - that’s not _normal_ -”

“Oh, so I’m a freak, now?”

“I never said you were a _freak_ , I just - Eddie, c’mon, you know more about healing from actual injuries than anyone - there’s _no way_ there’s a normal explanation for what just happened.”

Stan gestures to Eddie’s arm, and Eddie clenches his jaw. Stan’s right - Eddie knows he’s right - but that does little to quell the tsunami of disbelief currently wiping all rational thought from his mind. “You think I have superpowers,” Eddie repeats faintly.

“It would explain a lot, wouldn’t it?” Stan asks softly. “About what happened here, and - and what happened at the Standpipe. Something must’ve happened to you at the top of the stairs, Eddie, that’s - that’s the _only_ explanation for why the whole inside exploded and you walked out without a scratch on you. _And_ why you don’t remember anything that happened inside.”

Numbly, Eddie reaches to steady himself with a hand gripped tight around the closest ladder, blind to the gravel pattern beneath his shoes. “I - I’m - _superpowers?_ Those - those aren’t - they aren’t even _real!_ ”

“You have healing powers, Eddie. You healed yourself inside the Standpipe just like you healed yourself a minute ago. _Twice_.”

“I can’t have healing powers,” Eddie says faintly, “Ma’ll - ma’ll blow a gasket.”

“This is _good news_ , this means you’ll never have to go to the doctor’s again -”

“No, I - I _have_ to go to the doctor, he’s the one who checks my asthma -”

“When was the last time you needed your inhaler?”

Eddie blinks. He can’t even remember the last time he _saw_ his inhaler.

“You have healing powers, Eddie. You healed yourself - you _cured your own asthma_. This is good news. This is _amazing_.”

Stan’s looking at him like they’ve discovered something truly incredible, something awesome enough to shift the earth beneath their feet, but Eddie can feel himself frowning. “They’re healing powers,” he says, “that’s, like, the _lamest_ power. Besides Wolverine, how many superheroes are superheroes _because_ of their healing powers?”

Stan frowns too, but his eyes still glint with excitement. “Maybe you got other powers, too,” he offers after a moment. “Maybe - maybe you have to be in, like, a situation where you _have_ to use the powers before they actually show up.”

Eddie squints. “What the fuck does that mean?”

“Like - you didn’t know you had healing powers until you got hurt and needed to use them. Maybe you have other powers, too, but you won’t know until you _need_ to use them, y’know?”

“How exactly do you propose we figure that out, Stanley? You gonna _shank me_ again?”

Stan rolls his eyes, bereft of even an ounce of regret. “We should go to the Barrens,” he mutters by way of answering. “There’ll be less people around and we’ll have more room.”

“What about Bill and Richie?”

“They’ll figure it out when they see our bikes are gone.”

Stan’s already power-walking away, and Eddie trails after him, casting an uncertain glance at the school’s windows winking in the afternoon sun. “Wolverine isn’t even a superhero because of the healing powers, he’s a superhero because of the _claws_ ,” he mutters to himself, before hurrying to catch up.

They make it to the Barrens in record time, chattering aimlessly as they pass the library and curve around the bend. The tall grass sways lazily in the breeze, reaching up to brush against their legs as they dismount and stow their bikes behind the usual scraggly outcropping of bushes. Stan’s rambling about the benefits of telekinesis as they tramp through the underbrush, pausing only to point out slivering vines of poison ivy snaking across the path, and Eddie’s content to half-listen.

Healing powers. He has healing powers.

The words weigh funny in the back of his mind. He tries mouthing them, letting his tongue taste the shapes behind Stan’s back. _I have healing powers_ , he mouths. And then: _I have superpowers_.

Mouthing them does not lessen the ridiculousness.

Stan leads the way down into the valley, sticking close to the thin stream trickling through the half-dry riverbed. Eddie wrinkles his nose at the unpleasant stench wafting off the nearby sewage runoff pipes but presses onward anyways, wondering half-heartedly if his newfound healing powers might somehow translate to plugging up his nose without having to use his hands or breathe through his mouth. They keep walking until the sounds of traffic bustling by are distant and muted, and the path angles upward on the gentle slope between the Barrens and the dump, and the foliage over their heads traps most of the sunlight before it reaches the ground.

Stan stops suddenly, quickly scanning their surroundings before turning back toward Eddie. “Okay,” he says, all business. “So, we know you have healing powers. We don’t need to test that one again.”

“No, we really don’t.” Eddie scowls.

Stan flashes him a rueful grin. “We can see if you can fly?”

“I don’t think my healing powers will work if I fall out of a tree and land on my head and _die._ ”

“Fine. Super strength?”

Eddie purses his lips. “How would we test that?”

“We could go down to the dump and see if you can, like, lift a fridge or something?”

“Do you have any idea how _unsanitary_ -”

“Alright, fine, sorry. How about - what if you just, uh, punch - punch a tree?”

Eddie stares. “This is the dumbest thing we’ve ever done.”

“Dumber than when Richie tried to make up a new language for us to use so we could talk about people in front of them on the playground?”

“ _Dumber_ than Rich-inese. _Easily_.”

Stan snorts, and then gestures to the nearest tree. “We’re not getting any younger, dude.”

Eddie huffs and rolls his eyes - what a stupid thing for a ten-year-old to say, what a quintessential _Stanley_ thing to say - but shuffles toward the tree. “I feel really stupid,” he mutters, glaring at the rough bark. “What if I don’t have super strength and I just - just punch a fuckin’ tree for no reason?”

“You’ll be able to heal your hand and then we can start testing other powers. Go on. Punch it.”

Eddie balls his right hand into a fist, cocks it over his shoulder, and freezes. His heart is racing, rapping out a punishing tattoo against his sternum, beating so hard inside his ribcage he’s certain Stan can see it twitching beneath his chest. “Fucking _stupid_ ,” he mutters before swinging his fist at the tree with all his might.

His knuckles connect with the bark, and in a moment of disconnected shock, Eddie almost thinks he can hear the _crunch_ of breaking wood. He draws his hand back at an explosion of tree bark showering down around his feet, a gleeful smile splitting his face, and then -

And then the pain reaches him.

“ _Fuck!_ ” Eddie howls, swinging his throbbing hand around toward Stan. “ _Fuck! I think I broke my hand!_ ”

“ _Shit_ -”

Eddie twists away, still shaking his hand, groaning at the slick slide of his fingers through blood rapidly pouring from his knuckles. Pain shoots up his arm, burning hot, and he lets out a loud half-growl before doubling over his hand. The heat intensifies with a sharp gust of wind, and Eddie’s sure his hand is about to explode or fall right off his body -

“Holy _shit!_ ”

Eddie wrenches his hand away from his chest and gasps. From the wrist up, his hand is completely engulfed in flames. “ _Stan!_ ” Eddie shrieks, waving his hand around.

Stan leaps backwards with a terrified shout. “Put it out, _put it out!_ ”

“I don’t - _how?_ ”

Stan seems at a complete loss, eyes bugging out of his head as he tracks Eddie’s flaming hand closely. “The - the _river! Go to the river!_ ”

Eddie stumbles back out of the trees as quickly as he can, holding his flaming hand out before him like - well.

“ _Does it hurt?_ ” Stan shouts as they crash through the undergrowth.

 _“I’m on fire, dipshit!_ ”

He can hear the gentle babbling up ahead, the cool rush of water slipping across stones; he stumbles toward it on instinct, eyes never leaving his own hand held before him. They make it to the water’s edge and Eddie immediately dives down on his knees and plunges his hand into the water.

And somehow, the flames continue burning merrily beneath the current.

“Holy fucking _shit!_ ” yells Stan.

“What the fuck do I _do?_ _How do I turn this shit off?_ ”

“I don’t know, just - just - I don’t know!”

Eddie yanks his hand out of the water and groans, flinching away from the heat burning his face. “I can’t walk around like a human _torch,_ I - _fuck,_ just, just - _stop it!_ ”

He flings his hand out like he’s throwing a frisbee, and the flames shoot out in that direction in a blinding ball of fire. Eddie falls backwards - his newly flame-free hand catching his weight - as the fireball crashes into a nearby bush on the other side of the river and immediately engulfs every last twig in flames. Stan scrambles forward, leaping over the river and quickly stamping out the flames.

They’re both panting in the quiet that follows, staring at the smoldering remains of the bush.

“Okay,” Stan heaves, “did - did that hurt? Like, did your hand burn?”

Eddie lifts his hand up to his face - close enough to examine, but far enough that he won’t singe his eyebrows off if it spontaneously combusts again. His skin looks just the same as before - smooth and pale and too freckled along the back. He furrows his brow, trying to parse through the panic-hazy memory. “It - no, I - I mean it hurt after I punched the tree, and I felt, like, _heat_ on my face when I was swinging my hand around, but the actual fire didn’t hurt my _hand_.”

Stan nods, a pinkish hue coloring the apples of his cheeks as he struggles to catch his breath. “So - you can, you, uh - p-pyro. Fire. You can - create fire. That’s - uh, that’s - that’s _so awesome._ ”

He’s grinning broadly as he leaps back over the river, and Eddie hunches forward, arms wrapped around his knees. “This is fucking _bananas_ ,” he mutters.

“C’mon, I have some other ideas. Namely, teaching you how to punch - your thumb should go _outside_ your fingers when you make a fist, not inside.”

In addition to healing and fire, Stan pushes Eddie into discovering his super strength (he punched the second tree clean in half), _flying_ (after a particularly painful ten-minute argument between Stan on the ground and Eddie clinging stubbornly to a tree branch twelve feet up in the air that eventually broke under his weight) and super agility (that one was a complete accident - Eddie was too busy celebrating over figuring out how to extinguish a fireball in his hand without shooting it off that he tripped backwards over an exposed root and _backflipped_ all the way down the hill). They’re in the process of trying telekinesis when a familiar shout echoes up from the Barrens.

“ _Spaghetti man! Stanley the manly! Where are you?_ ”

Eddie shoots Stan a wolfish grin. “Oh, I’m totally gonna set his ass on _fire_ -”

Stan shushes him, muffling his laughter into his palm over the sounds of Richie singing an off-key rendition of the _Scooby Doo_ theme song. “You wanna show them everything?” he asks as Richie’s voice rises in volume and cracks over the high notes.

“Well, _yeah_ , why wouldn’t I?”

“I didn’t know if you wanted to keep it a secret, y’know, since you’re, like, a superhero now -”

“Super- I’m not a _superhero_ now, I just - have powers, okay, there’s a _huge_ difference, and they’re our _best friends!_ Besides, if I _really_ wanted to keep it a secret, I would’ve figured all this shit out on my own and kept _you_ out of it, too! I wanna tell them.”

Stan searches his gaze for another moment before nodding enthusiastically. “Richie’s gonna totally lose his shit,” Stan grins, and Eddie snorts.

They watch Bill and Richie make their way up the hill, grimacing in all the right places as Richie continues to sing. “Hi-ho!” Richie hollers once he spots them through the trees. “Why’re we way up here? You guys setting up for extreme hide-and-seek again?”

“C’mon!” Stan shouts. “We gotta show you something!”

Bill and Richie huff and puff up the hill - Richie far more dramatically than Bill - and Eddie bites down hard on the inside of his cheek as Richie drapes himself over Bill’s shoulders and lets out a loud, pitiful whine. “The altitude,” he gasps in a horrible southern drawl, “it’s simply _too much_ for my delicate constitution -”

“F-fuck off, Richie,” Bill mutters through a good-natured smile, shrugging Richie off and looking eagerly between Stan and Eddie. “Sorry we’re l-late. W-w-what’s goin’ o-on?”

Stan’s face appears to be in danger of cracking in half with the force of his grin. “So,” Eddie says, tearing his eyes away from Stan’s face to glance between Bill and Richie, “remember how I didn’t remember anything that happened to me in the Standpipe?”

Both Bill and Richie’s expressions darken immediately; Richie seems to freeze up completely, while Bill manages a stiff nod.

“Right, so - funny thing - I think I might’ve gotten superpowers.”

He’s pretty sure neither one of them was expecting that, judging from their identical slack-jawed expressions. “I-I’m sorry, w-w- _what?_ ”

“I know it sounds insane,” Stan says, “but it’s true. I saw it. We’ve been testing stuff out all afternoon. Eddie has superpowers.”

“A-and you think - you th-think it has to do w-with whatever h-happened in the S-Stuh-handpipe?”

“We were walking out of the school right after the last bell, and Bowers was there and he shoved both of us, and I fell -”

“He fell down _hard_ , scraped up both of his hands and his knees really bad -”

“- and Stan was trying to help so I wouldn’t have to go to the nurse or go home -”

“- and there was this _strong_ wind, like _so strong_ it almost knocked me over right before I poured on the antiseptic -”

“- and it was just _gone_.”

Richie’s looking between Stan and Eddie like they’ve grown a third head between them, but Bill’s brow is furrowed hard in concentration. “ _What_ was g-gone?”

“The scrapes,” Eddie turns his palms out toward Bill. “They just disappeared.”

Bill blinks, staring at Eddie’s hands. “A-and - you’re _sure_ i-it wasn’t just -”

“We tested it again right after, and the same thing happened again. Actually,” Stan turns to Eddie thoughtfully. “Maybe we should just show them?”

Eddie lets his head fall to one side, letting a low groan out from the base of his throat. He'd willingly bet that if the amount of pain he'd experienced this afternoon could somehow be quantified, that number would be _exponentially_ larger than the entire rest of his life's worth of pain. “Do we _have_ to?”

“If you want them to believe you -”

“ _Fine._ ”

Eddie extends his left arm toward Stan as Stan pulls his pocket knife out of his pocket, the blade still stained with Eddie’s blood from earlier. Richie and Bill’s loud protests garble together in Eddie’s ears; Richie’s halfway lunged across the clearing when Stan’s knife pierces the soft skin of Eddie’s forearm and quickly slices down.

“ _S_ _tan!_ ” Richie shouts, wrenching Eddie’s arm away from the blade by his wrist, gripping hard enough to bruise on either side of the long, thin gash. “ _What the fuck!_ ”

“It’s okay, Rich!” Eddie says loudly, loosely gripping Richie’s wrist with his free hand even as blood begins to drip down his arm and twine through Richie’s fingers. “It’s _fine_ , watch!”

Bill presses in close on Richie’s other side, staring down intently at Eddie’s arm. Richie’s chest is heaving, his face still contorted in shock and anger; Eddie feels a now-familiar breeze kick up behind him, gusting in sharply to pull at his clothes and ruffle his hair. He gets to watch it happen, this time - he gets to watch the ragged edges of his tattered skin glow a bright, blinding gold.

And when the golden light dissipates, his arm is perfectly smooth and unblemished.

Both Richie and Bill gasp sharply, and Eddie tries to bite back a wince when Richie’s grip on his arm grows tighter. “What the fuck just happened?” Richie breathes.

“He _healed himself._ With his _healing powers_.”

Magnified blue eyes flick up to meet Eddie’s behind thick spectacles. “You’re - you -”

“I think it’s how I got out of the Standpipe without getting hurt.” Eddie explains when it becomes obvious Richie’s not going to splutter anything else, squeezing Richie’s wrist ( _gently_ , he punched a _tree_ in half not thirty minutes ago), wincing openly at Richie’s fluttering pulse under the pads of his fingers. “Remember - remember how I said I thought I was hurt, but then I wasn’t?” Richie nods a bit dumbly, mouth still agape. “I think, whatever happened in there, I - I _did_ get hurt, but I healed myself without even realizing it.”

Bill reaches out and touches Eddie’s arm, fingertips a light and warm brush against his skin. “D’you th-think you _got_ them w-when it e-eh-eh-ex- _shit_. Blew up?”

“I guess. I still don’t remember what happened, but it must’ve been what did this.”

“You’re telling me,” Richie chokes as Bill drops his hand, “you - you got your superpowers - in the Standpipe?”

Eddie shrugs.

“The Standpipe - that _I_ wanted to explore? The Standpipe that _you_ talked me out of exploring? _You stole my superpowers?_ ”

Eddie’s heart freezes in his chest for all of two seconds, before he’s able to process the gleeful, shit-eating grin stretching across Richie’s face. “I didn’t steal _shit_ from you, four-eyes!” he squawks over Richie’s laughter. “ _You’re_ the one who trapped me in there, you - you _forced_ these powers on me!”

Richie lets out a delighted, whooping laugh, jumping up and down and shaking Eddie’s arm in his excitement. “This is fucking _awesome!_ You’re a real-life X-Man! Oh my god, oh my god, what other powers do you have? _Eds! This is fucking amazing!_ ”

Eddie laughs, bright and loud. “I’ll show you!”

They don’t leave the Barrens until well after dark, walking alongside their bikes and struggling to keep their voices down as they pass the large crowd milling outside of the Aladdin. Richie in particular seems to have the hardest time with the whole _not shouting_ thing; he has to bite down on his own knuckles before the Aladdin is even in view, and by the time they make it around the far corner and into safer territory, he's practically vibrating out of his own skin.

“What’s your superhero name gonna be?” Richie asks later once they’re all sprawled comfortably before the Denbrough’s flickering television. Eddie cranes his neck up from his spot on the floor at the end of the couch to frown up at Richie, currently sprawled across the length of the couch, cheek smushed against the worn cushion on the other end of the couch. “Like, what’s your _identity_ gonna be?”

“Who says I’m becoming a superhero?” Eddie asks, returning his attention to the television.

Richie’s head pops off the cushion, expression contorted with alarm; the movement brings Eddie’s gaze back to his face, bewildered. “How could you _not_ become a superhero? You have _actual_ superpowers!”

“So? It’s not like there are _supervillains_ out there -”

“That we _know_ of!”

“Yeah, we didn’t even know superpowers were real until, like, five hours ago,” Stan unhelpfully supplies from the other side of the coffee table.

Eddie glowers at Stan a moment, before heaving a sigh and tipping his head back to the couch cushion, his gaze fixated on the ceiling. “S’not like any of them are in _Derry_ ,” Eddie sniffs. “There’s, like, no need. For a superhero, I mean.”

“I d-dunno, Eddie,” Bill says thoughtfully. “D-d-don’t most s-s-superheroes m-meet their, like, arch n-nih-nemesis right _after_ they g-guh-get their powers?”

“You’re gonna _have_ to think of something, spaghetti man,” Richie drawls, nudging the top of Eddie’s head with his ankle, “can’t let your real identity get out there.” Richie’s head lolls thoughtfully back to the cushion for a brief moment before springing up again, excitement renewed. “Oh! That’s _it!_ Your superhero name could be _Spaghetti Man!_ ”

Eddie lifts his head and scowls over the sound of Bill and Stan's combined snickering. “Good news, guys, I’ve _officially_ found my arch nemesis.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let me know what you guys think so far!!! I have so much more of this I'm excited to share!!!
> 
> As always please feel free to come hit me up on [tumblr!](elsaclack.tumblr.com) I'm new to the fandom and I'm excited to make friends :)


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> From then on, his days are filled with mindless heat and melting ice cream cones and the uncomfortable chill of the arcade’s air conditioning working overtime, just like every summer before it. Except now his nights glow bright with the bonfires he starts with his bare hands for himself and his friends along the rocky shore of the Kenduskeag, and his weekends echo the loud, braying laughter that comes with the short, looping flights he carries his friends on over the long stretch of Derry High School’s football field when the sun is close to setting and the shadows hide them from traffic on the highway nearby.
> 
> They spend endless afternoons in the shady Barrens, slothful in the heat, and Richie stops carrying a lighter around after Eddie figures out how to light tiny flames on the tips of his fingers. He cackles when Eddie lights a flame on his middle finger and puffs over Eddie’s long-winded rants, but carefully blows the smoke away from Eddie and the others, ever-mindful of Eddie’s asthma that apparently no longer exists.
> 
> It is as close to paradise as Derry will ever get for him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings for this chapter: Henry Bowers being Henry Bowers once more, more graphic descriptions of injuries and injury-related blood, racist comments, homophobic comments, and slut-shaming. And once again, if there's anything else I haven't included that you feel should be included, please let me know and I'll gladly add it! :)

Here’s how summer vacation starts for Eddie Kaspbrak:

He’s woken at exactly six minutes after eight o’clock in the morning to the sounds of his bedroom door locking from the outside and his mother telling him in a deceptively sweet voice that he’s _clearly_ in need of extended bed rest if the school year left him so ravaged with exhaustion that he would sleep in _this late_. And even though he’s perfectly capable of literally ripping his bedroom door off its hinges - or of opening the window and just flying away - Eddie quickly resigns himself to his fate, knowing from hard-earned experience that both bargaining and complaining do far more harm than good. He whiles away the time with his own faux thankfulness whenever his mother brings him bland, lukewarm meals to eat at his desk and presses her ear to the door the moment after she leaves and locks the door behind her, and lighting old report cards and birthday cards on fire in the trash can from under his desk when she falls asleep downstairs.

(He keeps the trash can angled up close to the open window so the passing breeze can whisk the smoke away, of course.)

His friends come by on that first afternoon, but Eddie manages to catch their attention from his open bedroom window before they even make it to the front porch; Stan and Bill seem to understand immediately, but Richie just looks put-out, pouting and whining about wanting to go _flying, right now._ Eddie smothers his own disappointment by promising to take them _all_ flying just as soon as his ma lets him out again.

All-in, he’s locked in his room (save for brief bathroom and shower breaks) for a full week.

He stops taking his medication during that week.

It’s not so much a conscious act of rebellion against his mother - he’s not brave enough for that, yet - but more of an anxiety-riddled need to _explore._ He still hasn’t needed his inhaler, not once since before staggering out of the Standpipe, but ultimately it’s Stan who planted the seed of doubt in Eddie’s mind: _you cured your own asthma._

Perhaps asthma was just the first in a long list of ailments from which he’d healed himself.

So he stops taking the medication, but not so courageously that he’s willing to allow his mother to find out about it - instead he dutifully parsels out each day’s worth of pills into his pill organizer under her watchful eye, and then tips each day’s worth of pills out into his palm and flings them out the open window into the side yard between their house and the Bowdens’ next door when he’s sure she’s too absorbed in the television downstairs to pay him any mind.

(Maybe, if he had a normal mom, he’d worry about her finding them scattered through the grass - it’s been a _while_ since Derry’s last bout of cleansing rain. Of course finding them would require her to actually _go outside,_ and Eddie’s _pretty_ sure his mother hasn’t voluntarily gone outside since the seventies.)

The week passes slowly, but Eddie doesn’t spontaneously die in his sleep or on the toilet from any of his laundry list of various unnamed sicknesses. His mother finally relents, and Eddie rockets out of the house with a fanny pack free of rattling pill bottles and a clunky inhaler, feeling fifty pounds lighter.

From then on, his days are filled with mindless heat and melting ice cream cones and the uncomfortable chill of the arcade’s air conditioning working overtime, just like every summer before it. Except now his nights glow bright with the bonfires he starts with his bare hands for himself and his friends along the rocky shore of the Kenduskeag, and his weekends echo the loud, braying laughter that comes with the short, looping flights he carries his friends on over the long stretch of Derry High School’s football field when the sun is close to setting and the shadows hide them from traffic on the highway nearby. His grin threatens to become a permanent fixture on his face, so often is he laughing at each exhilarated scream from Stan and each crowing laugh from Bill and each exaggerated, nasally sports reporter commentary from Richie, shouted over the wind so Eddie can hear.

They spend endless afternoons in the shady Barrens, slothful in the heat, and Richie stops carrying a lighter around after Eddie figures out how to light tiny flames on the tips of his fingers. He cackles when Eddie lights a flame on his middle finger and puffs over Eddie’s long-winded rants, but carefully blows the smoke away from Eddie and the others, ever-mindful of Eddie’s asthma that apparently no longer exists.

It is as close to paradise as Derry will ever get for him.

Eddie finishes the seventh grade two years later with Bill, Richie, and Stan at his side. It’s the last summer they spend together, just the four of them; there were moments - fleeting, but moments all the same - he found himself sitting back and observing, _savoring_.

He didn’t really understand why until years later.

But not even Richie gave him shit for it that summer.

Puberty turns out to be even worse with superpowers, which Eddie can only _hope_ is unsurprising; health class doesn’t exactly cover the effects of flight on bone density development. In addition to weird body hair and painful growth spurts (which really are more _pain_ than _growth_ , dammit), Eddie also finds himself twisting his whole body away from prying eyes so he can sneeze into his occasionally spontaneously combusting palms, and absentmindedly levitating textbooks and trash cans an inch above whatever surface they were resting on before when his focus slips during class.

(Oh, yeah, he has telekinesis, too - much to Stan’s combined consternation and delight, as it was _Stan himself_ who was Eddie’s first unintentional subject of levitation. It was also Stan who suggests Eddie wear a rubber band around his wrist and get into the habit of snapping it while daydreaming to keep his hands occupied, and Eddie’s lucky enough to have at least one of his friends in every single one of his classes, none of whom take any issue with pelting the back of his head with spitballs on the days when his rubber band breaks early and his mind wanders anyways.)

The eighth grade is primarily made up of increasingly difficult classes and constant reminders that the workload only increases in size and difficulty in high school - as if Eddie should be _thankful_ for the endless reading assignments and book reports and history projects and extended lab reports that occupy most of his free time. The whole year passes in a blur; it seems like one second, Eddie’s joining the other eighth graders in playfully jeering at the wide-eyed crop of seventh graders sitting on the other side of the auditorium during the first-day-of-school assembly, and the next he’s cleaning out his locker and slamming it closed for the last time.

 _All for the better,_ he thinks as he hikes his backpack up on his shoulder and scans the bobbing sea of heads surrounding him for a familiar face.

“Uh, hey, Eddie?”

Eddie turns and finds himself almost nose-to-nose with Ben Hanscom, the chubby new kid who sat behind him in both his pre-AP US History _and_ his pre-AP English classes. Ben looks nervous, which isn’t exactly new but sets Eddie’s teeth on edge anyways, visibly chewing on the inside of his cheek as his dark eyes dart over Eddie’s face. Eddie steps back on instinct, head tilted up to better meet Ben's eyes. “Hey, Ben,” he says cheerfully.

“Hey, uh, I - I was wondering if you, if you maybe wanted to, uh - to hang out with me tonight? My mom’s making tortellini for dinner, and she said she could drive us to the Aladdin to see the new Star Trek afterwards -”

“Ooh, _actually,_ ” a familiar voice drawls in Eddie’s ear. A heavy arm slings across Eddie’s neck, momentarily bowing Eddie’s body forward; Richie’s leveling a blinding, shit-eating grin at Ben, seemingly not noticing the angry huff Eddie lets out. “Eddie Spaghetti _only_ eats spaghetti, so tortellini is a no-go. It’s not cannibalism, it’s just a biology thing -”

"Did you even put on deodorant this morning?" Richie grins and winks, and Eddie squirms beneath his arm. “ _Eugh_ , that's _disgusting_ , Richie! Get your sweaty armpit _off_ of me _right now!_ ”

Richie tightens his grip, dragging Eddie closer with the movement, and before Eddie can get his hands up in front of his face to shield himself, Richie’s already pinching one of his cheeks. The fact that Richie has to look _down_ to meet his gaze, now, and Eddie can’t leap up to hover the extra inches necessary to put them on even ground in public as they are - it’s all absolutely _rage-inducing._ “Cute, cute, _cute!_ ” Richie crows, the final nail in the coffin.

Eddie bats Richie’s hand away with as much force as he dares. “ _Quit it!”_

“Sorry,” Ben says, slowly backing away. Eddie flushes, guilt rearing up in his gut at the wide-eyed look of confusion and disappointment on Ben’s face.

“I’m sorry, Ben, I - I kind of already have plans tonight, but -”

“It’s okay!” Ben interrupts quickly. “It’s fine, I’ll - it’s totally fine.”

“Wait, no, _Ben_ -!”

Ben manages to vanish with astounding dexterity into the crowd still moving past Eddie and Richie toward the exit. Eddie lets out a strangled little growl when he loses sight of Ben’s bobbing head, shoving against Richie’s arm still draped over his shoulders with enough force that Richie stumbles a little, shoulder lightly connecting with the lockers. He catches the shock sparking like lightning in Richie’s eyes, but elects to ignore it. “Why’d you _do_ that, man? He was just trying to be _nice_ -”

“Sorry I stole you away from your new best friend, _Eduardo_ ,” Richie drawls, already over his shock as he straightens up. “He probably wants to harvest your organs to make his family’s secret tortellini sauce - _the secret ingredient is your kidneys!_ ” Richie finishes the last bit in a high, warbling voice that Eddie thinks might be an impersonation of a grandma or possibly a witch, given the way Richie hunches his shoulders and reaches up to adjust his glasses to ride lower down the bridge of his nose.

“He’s not my best friend,” Eddie grumbles, refusing to humor Richie’s shitty Voice with a smile. “He’s just - he’s _new,_ dude, he’s just trying to make friends. I’m allowed to have other friends besides you, Bill, and Stan.”

“Whoa, Eds, I never said you weren’t _allowed_ \- sorry, I just - I was just joking around. I’m sorry.”

“Well you didn’t have to be such a _prick_ about it.”

“What was Richie being a prick about?”

Stan sidles up between them, curious gaze roving over Richie’s flushed face. “That new kid, Ben Hanscom, asked if I wanted to hang out with him tonight. Richie acted like a total ass about it.”

“Oh my god, it was a _joke!_ ” Richie throws both hands up in the air, eyes wide. “I said I’m _sorry_ -”

“I know him,” Stan interrupts thoughtfully. “He’s in my Spanish class. He moved here in February, right?”

“Right. D’you think Bill would mind if I invited him to hang out with us tonight? I feel really bad for him, but I don’t wanna, like, overstep or whatever.”

Stan shrugs. “Bill probably wouldn’t mind,” he says mildly. “His parents never seem to care either way, I’m pretty sure Bill stopped asking them for permission for us to come over the summer between sixth and seventh grade.”

“Can you guys find Bill and ask him for me, just to be sure? I’m gonna try to catch up with Ben before he leaves.”

Stan nods and Richie dutifully salutes, still a little flushed, and Eddie takes off down the hallway toward the exit. The crowd has thinned significantly by then, leaving only a few stray people dotting the lawn leading up to the middle school’s main entrance, and for a moment Eddie’s certain he’s missed his chance. But then he glances to the right and spots Ben standing halfway up the far staircase, motionless and seemingly staring off into space.

“Ben?”

Ben starts at the sound of his name and whirls around, clutching a yearbook to his chest. Panic paints his cheeks blotchy red and doubles the circumference of his gaze until it settles on Eddie; all at once, the tension leaves his shoulders, and his complexion fades into a less alarming color. “Hey, Eddie.”

“Hey, I’m sorry about before. Richie was just joking around, he’s just - sometimes he just does and says stupid shit without thinking, he really didn’t mean anything by what he said -”

“It’s okay, really, I had health with him and he seems nice and - yeah. I get it.”

Eddie laughs, and Ben flashes him a small, uncertain smile. “Well, hey, I wanted to also apologize for not being able to go to your house tonight - I kinda have plans with some of my other friends, it’s this dumb tradition we have on the last day of every school year.”

“It’s really okay, Eddie, don’t worry about it. I just thought if you didn’t have anything else going on -”

“Well, actually, I was wondering if you maybe wanted to join us? It’s me, Richie, Stan Uris, and Bill Denbrough? Basically we just go down to the Barrens and hang out until the sun goes down, and then we go to Bill’s house to watch movies and spend the night.”

Ben honestly looks like he’s been handed a piece of real gold. “Are - are you sure? I don’t wanna impose on your traditions or anything -”

“I’m sure. They want you to come. It’s about time we hang out with someone other than each other, anyways.”

The expression on Ben’s face is undeniably hopeful, his giddy excitement palpable. “Okay!” Ben says, nodding vigorously. “Okay, I - I gotta ask my mom, but -”

“That’s fine! Just meet us at the Barrens if she says yes, we’re biking straight there from here. You can ride double with one of us back to Bill’s house if you don’t have a bike.”

Ben’s still nodding almost frantically, beaming, and Eddie can’t help the broad grin spreading across his own face. “It’ll only take, like, twenty minutes tops - I’ll meet you guys there!”

He totters down the rest of the stairs and takes off across the lawn at a run, his yearbook hiked up under his armpit and his backpack bouncing violently against his broad back. Eddie watches him go, still smiling even as Ben disappears around the far corner.

Bill, Stan, and Richie emerge from inside the school several minutes later, Richie’s previous embarrassment apparently long-forgotten based on how loudly he’s arguing with Bill while Stan heaves long-suffering sighs from the middle. “I _know_ Eddie will agree with me,” Richie says to Bill as he flings his arm around Eddie’s neck again. “Spaghedward, please tell Big Billiam that your highly esteemed brethren, the one and only _Spider-Man_ , would kick Godzilla’s ass in a fight.”

“N-no offence, E-Eddie, but G-Guh-hodzilla would c- _completely_ destroy Spider-M-Man in l-luh-less than t-ten seconds.”

Eddie makes a face. “Why would I take offense to that? Do I look like Spider-Man?”

“You _totally_ have Peter Parker vibes, Eds, don’t try to deny it -”

“I don’t _shoot webs_ , dingus -”

“H-have you ever t-truh-hied?”

“You got the whole high school cutie with secret powers thing goin’ on, that’s _totally_ Peter Parker -”

“You’re all idiots,” Stan murmurs as Eddie opens his mouth to retort, eyeing a pair of small birds fluttering near the top of one of the newly planted trees just off the walkway sloping down to the faculty parking lot. “Do those look like yellow-breasted chats to you?”

“ _Yellow breasts?_ ” Richie repeats loudly, over-enunciating. Several heads swivel in their direction, and Stan groans. “ _Where? Where are the yellow breasts, Stanley?_ ”

“Can you please drop him from the top of the press box next time we go flying, Eddie?” Stan mutters as Richie cackles. “I’ll give you _half_ my bar mitzvah money.”

“I’d drop him from the press box for _free_ , Stanley, you _know_ that.”

Bill laughs, and Richie flips Stan off and blows a raspberry against Eddie’s cheek. “I guess we’ll have to wait until later to go flying if Ben’s gonna hang out and spend the night with us,” Richie sighs, ignoring Eddie growling in disgust and scrubbing at his cheek as they make their way down the steps toward the bike rack at the far end of the lawn. He’s got most of his weight thrown over Eddie’s shoulders, but no one besides Eddie, Stan, and Bill can really tell; Eddie’s gotten a particularly good handle on his super strength in the last year, after months of accidentally smacking his friends the way he always used to and leaving behind mottled, angry bruises on their chests and shoulders and arms. It’s easy, even with Richie’s ridiculous lanky bean-pole physique draped over Eddie’s considerably shorter, more compact frame, for Eddie to carry on walking like Richie weighs little more than a paperclip. Because as far as Eddie can tell, he _does._

People still stare, though.

“Would you _get off me?_ ” Eddie hisses as they pass by Gretta Keene, who immediately turns to Sally Mueller and starts whispering and giggling snottily behind her hand, eyes continually flitting in their direction. “You can barely walk normally with your gangly-ass arms and legs, I’m _definitely_ not supposed to be able to do it without falling over.” Richie snickers as he straightens up, oblivious, pausing only to pinch Eddie’s cheek one last time before letting his hand fall to his side. “Don’t _do that,_ you know I - I -”

Eddie freezes. Ice floods the cavern of his belly, solidifying beneath his fingers. He gasps, brow furrowed, staring down at the suddenly blurry shapes of his feet.

“E-Eddie?”

There’s a faint tugging sensation around his naval, a curious pull leading to the left, toward downtown. Eddie’s faintly aware of the fact that he’s suddenly panting, that Bill, Stan, and Richie have all stopped a few paces ahead of him to stare in confusion, that other kids from school are sending him curious glances as they pass; the tugging sensation intensifies, and Eddie stumbles off in that direction, hardly pausing to glance either way for oncoming traffic before taking off across the street at a dead sprint. It leads him around Keene’s Pharmacy on the corner, down the sidewalk past the arcade and the Aladdin and the Secondhand Rose and the hardware store-cum-bookstore at the far end of Main Street. He’s not even sure if his friends are still with him; all he can really process is the firm tug in his gut and the distant sounds of muffled grunting.

Quick footsteps - multiple sets, if Eddie’s not mistaken - echo down the alley on the far side of Freese’s, just outside of Eddie’s line of vision, warped but unmistakably distancing. Eddie pumps his legs faster, wishing desperately that it wasn’t broad daylight and he could get away with flying before practically skidding past the mouth of the alley, catching himself on the far wall at the last second.

Despite the flurry of vanishing heels at the other end of the alley, he zeroes in at once on the slumped figure huddled against the brick wall on the department store’s side of the alley, half-hidden by an upturned trash can. Eddie can tell the person is trembling before he even gets into the alley; it’s not until Eddie’s crouching down beside him that he realizes the dark eyes blinking blearily up at him are shockingly familiar.

“ _Ben?_ ”

“ _Ugh_ ,” Ben grunts, hands shaking uselessly over the bloody, tattered remains of his shirt. Eddie swallows thickly, tamping down intrusive AIDS statistics that pop up in his brain like buoys and rucking the shirt up over Ben’s belly. He’s unable to bite back a gasp at what greets him.

A large, bloody _H_ has been carved _deep_ into Ben’s gut.

“ _Shit!_ ” Richie’s voice is loud and breathless over Eddie’s shoulder, audible even over the deafening echoes of three sets of feet pounding down the alley toward them. “Holy _shit,_ Haystack, what the fuck happened to _you?_ ”

Ben peers up at Richie over Eddie’s shoulder, brow furrowed in confusion. “Haystack?” he repeats in a weak croak.

“Nevermind, nevermind,” Stan snaps, “just - _what happened?_ ”

“Henry Bowers,” Ben mumbles.

“ _Fuck,_ ” Eddie hisses, fingertips pressing gently into the skin around the carving. It’s pouring blood, enough to gush down in thick rivulets and stain the waistline of Ben’s jeans dark, rusted brown. “It’s - it’s really bad, Ben.”

“You can fix him up, though, can’t you, Doctor K? With your fanny pack -”

“I don’t have stuff for _stitches_ in my fanny pack, Rich -”

“He needs a _hospital_ ,” Stan says reproachfully. “I can go call nine-one-one from the payphone across the street.”

Ben’s head falls back against the brick wall supporting him, a pitiful whine emanating from his throat as Stan takes off running back down the alley. “It’s gonna be fine, Ben,” Eddie says, trying to pitch his voice to a soothing volume. “Really, it’s gonna be okay.”

“E-Eh-Eddie,” Bill murmurs. Eddie glances back; Bill’s crouched down just behind him, his face a mask of determination. “D-do you think - m-muh-maybe you c-could -”

Eddie exhales twice, searching Bill’s face. “I don’t know if I can for other people,” he mumbles after a moment.

“Y-you could t-truh- _try_.”

Eddie stares a second longer, before returning his gaze to Ben’s bleeding stomach. His fingers are already tingling before he presses them against Ben’s skin; inexplicably he knows, before he closes his eyes, that it’s going to work.

The familiar rush of air pushes the sweat-dampened fringe of hair away from his forehead, and he hears Ben gasp; a faint golden glow reaches through Eddie’s closed eyelids as the wind rushes down the short length of his arms, flaring bright for a long moment before gently fading.

If not for the blood still staining his jeans and his tattered t-shirt, Eddie would never be able to tell Ben was hurt only moments earlier. Eddie retracts his hands and rocks back on his haunches, carefully avoiding Ben’s incredulous and unwavering stare as Richie takes off down the alley to catch up with Stan. “N-nuh- _nice_ , E-Eddie,” Bill says, clapping a warm hand on Eddie’s shoulder.

“You - you,” Ben shoves himself up to sit somewhat straight, eyes never leaving Eddie’s face even as his hands press against his now unmarred stomach. “How did - how did you do that?”

Eddie swallows, briefly meeting Ben’s gaze before glancing back at Bill over his shoulder. Bill looks between Eddie and Ben, seemingly sizing Ben up - and then he nods at Eddie. “I - I can heal,” Eddie says, slowly turning back to face Ben. “It’s, like - a, uh, power? I guess? I can - like, if I get hurt, I can heal myself, and - and I guess, uh, I guess I can, like, heal other people, now, too?”

Ben blinks up at him, hand absently resting over the torn holes in his shirt. “Like a - a superpower?”

“Yeah.”

“I’d ask if this was a joke if - if I hadn’t just seen it happen.”

Eddie huffs out a breath. “Y-y-you can’t tell ah-anyone,” Bill says seriously, hand closing over Eddie’s shoulder and squeezing. “N-no one can f-find out. You h-hah- _have_ to p-promise.”

Ben nods solemnly, a familiar, endearing earnestness shining in his eyes. “I won’t, I won’t tell anyone. I swear.”

Eddie feels his shoulders loosen, a relief he did not realize he was craving now thundering through his veins as echoing footsteps kick up at the mouth of the alley. Richie and Stan race toward them, both pale and wind-swept as Bill straightens up and offers Eddie a hand. “You good, Haystack?” Richie pants as he skids to a stop at Eddie's side.

Bill pulls Eddie upright, and Ben’s answer is lost to the sudden rush of blood in Eddie’s ears; Eddie staggers forward with the leftover momentum, hands connecting blindly with the warm planes of Bill’s chest as his knees quake beneath him. The _feeling_ zipping through his limbs - it’s exhaustion to the furthest extreme, leaving him seconds away from falling apart at his joints in a splintered pile of useless limbs like a marionette cut from its strings. Eddie gasps, eyes screwed shut, only barely aware of the tight grip Bill has on his elbows and the unforgiving curve of Bill’s shoulder now pressed to Eddie’s forehead. It’s like every ounce of strength Eddie possesses is draining away; vertigo swells harshly between his eyes, pressing against the inside of his skull so forcefully he genuinely fears it might split him open.

The worst of it passes after a moment, the rushing sound fading in his ears - and now he can process the hushed-but-growing-less-so, concerned voices all around him, the clammy palms pressed to the nape of his neck and the thin swell of his bicep and the curve of his spine in addition to Bill’s still gripping his elbows. He groans softly and lifts his head - the sound is all muffled and strangled and wrong - and the hands on his bicep and neck curl a little tighter.

“ _Eddie._ ”

Richie’s voice is firm, close enough to sound clearly over the rush still dying down in Eddie’s ears. He blinks blearily, eyes rolling beneath his fluttering eyelids for a moment until he forces himself to focus on the faded logo stretched across Bill’s chest, half hidden beneath Eddie’s palms. The hands on his neck and arm pull - gently, but insistently - and he lets himself be redirected to the left, colliding sideways into the lean tower of Richie’s body. Richie’s hands - they were Richie’s hands - instantly transition to the side of his face and the space between his shoulder blades. Eddie shudders at the heat dragging a soothing circle between his shoulders, focusing on the shallow rise and fall of Richie’s chest against his arm and the gentle, occasional brush of Richie’s collarbone against his temple as his strength slowly returns.

He lets his head fully drop sideways to rest on Richie’s shoulder, anyways.

“What the hell was _that?_ ” asks Stan.

Stan’s voice is tense, echoing the straining band of muscle now looped tightly around Eddie’s shoulders. Eddie lets out one last trembling exhale through his nose before lifting his head from the curve of Richie’s neck, meeting Bill’s grim, knowing gaze first.

“Y-you used too m-muh-much energy, d-dih-didn’t you?”

“I - I think so?” Eddie presses his fingers to his faintly aching temple, ignoring Richie’s thumb stroking an uneven arch over his cheekbone. “I don’t know, I’ve never felt anything like that before.”

“You’ve never _done_ anything like that before,” Stan points out, eyes darting to Ben - now half-leaning on a dented trash can to Eddie’s right, watching silently, eyes wide. “You’ve only ever healed _yourself_ \- never anyone else. It must’ve taken more energy.”

“Are you okay now?”

Eddie blinks at the uncharacteristic gentleness in Richie’s tone. Richie’s hand is still on Eddie’s face, thumb still stroking, like it’s a nervous tick and he’s not fully aware of his movements anymore. He tilts his head up to meet Richie’s gaze, smiling hesitantly when Richie’s hand falls from his face to curl loosely against his shoulder. “Yeah,” he says - more hoarse than he expects - and lets Richie search his gaze another moment.

Richie stays close as Eddie straightens up, hands no longer touching, but hovering close enough that he might as well. Eddie takes another steadying breath and squares his shoulders, finally meeting Ben’s bewildered eyes. “Are you okay?”

Ben nods. “Are _you?_ ”

Eddie nods, ignoring the other three staring holes through the back of his head. “You should call your mom. I’ll stay with you in case - uh, in case. Can, uh -” Stan steps into Eddie’s peripheral the moment Eddie begins casting about. “Can you guys go get my bike? We can all walk to Ben’s house so he can get his bike and clothes for tomorrow morning and stuff. I can tell you more once we get to the Barrens,” Eddie says to Ben. “I - I can _show_ you more in the Barrens.”

Ben’s mom is still at work, so Ben leaves a voicemail from the payphone, mumbling about _new friends_ and _spending the night_ , only glancing back at Eddie to confirm Bill’s last name. Bill, Stan, and Richie are jogging back down the street toward them by the time Ben hangs up, Richie balancing his own bike with one hand and Eddie’s with the other.

They walk all of three blocks in tense silence before Richie finally lets out a loud, lamenting whine at how _boring_ walking is; and just like that, the tension is gone, the four - now _five_ \- falling into familiar banter. They make it another half a block before Eddie proposes just riding their bikes the rest of the way, and it only takes about five minutes of coaxing and promising for Ben to agree to ride double with Eddie. His grip on Eddie’s narrow shoulders is tight and nervous for all of ten seconds before Eddie’s enhanced strength becomes apparent; Eddie grins at the warm, solid weight against his back and the exhilarated baritone laughter rumbling in his ears as he picks up speed, briefly wondering if this is Ben’s first time to ride double with anyone. A pang of sadness splinters through his heart at the thought, but then Richie’s swerving in close to Eddie’s left, all bright eyes and toothy grins as he watches Ben balance against Eddie’s back. Eddie briefly catches his gaze; pride, unmistakable pride, shines through the smudged, flashing lenses of Richie’s glasses.

Ben’s bike joins the regular pile behind that familiar outcropping of scraggly bushes at the edge of the Barrens thirty minutes later, and Eddie pauses at the mouth of their makeshift walking trail to admire the sight of it half on top of his and Bill’s bikes. It feels _right,_ in a way he scarcely understands. Ben falls into the flow of conversation easily, joining Richie’s side of the Spider-Man versus Godzilla argument from before, listening patiently and thoughtfully to Bill’s stuttered arguments and smiling at each of Stanley’s disparaging interjections. He _likes_ Ben; he wants to _keep_ Ben.

Bill leads the way up into the trees between the Barrens and the dump, stopping in the same clearing Eddie and Stan stopped in years earlier. Eddie eyes the splintered tree stump he punched in half, and the broken branch still decaying in the dirt a few feet above and beyond that, and then turns his head back toward the group. They’re in a disjointed circle - Bill, then Eddie, then Richie, then Stan, then Ben. Anxiety thrums in Ben’s eyes at the sudden change of atmosphere; even Richie has fallen quiet, watching Ben with a measured, unreadable expression.

“I kn-know I a-ah-already s-said it, but,” Bill steps forward and turns, angling himself between Ben and Eddie. “You a-ah-absolutely _can’t_ tell a- _anyone_ about Eh-Eddie. _No one._ ”

“No one else knows,” Stan says evenly, “and we’ve known for years, so if anyone else finds out, we’ll know it was you.”

“And if _anything_ happens to Eddie, Haystack -”

“Rich,” Eddie interrupts softly.

Richie’s voice is off - too thick, too furious at a hypothetical situation, and somehow it leaves Eddie feeling even more off-kilter than the bizarre overprotectiveness Bill and Stan are currently projecting. Richie hesitates, eyes flashing to Eddie beneath his glasses. “I won’t,” Ben says in the quiet, solemn and nervous, and Richie’s attention darts back to Ben across the circle. “I swear, I won’t tell anyone. Eddie - you’ve always been really nice to me, I would never - I _promise_ -”

“It’s okay, Ben, I believe you,” Eddie says earnestly, wishing he could somehow show Ben exactly how sincere the sentiment is. “I know you won’t tell anyone, I know. I trust you.”

Ben doesn’t deflate right away - he waits until Bill and Stan and Richie all nod, satisfied with Eddie’s judgement, and _then_ he visibly relaxes. “I don’t think I even remembered to say thank you for helping me in the alley,” he says, voice all funny and choked with relief. “You pretty much saved my life, Bowers said he was gonna carve his entire name into my stomach before he heard you coming. How’d - uh, did you - do you also have, like…”

He trails, suddenly looking uncertain. “You can ask questions,” Eddie tells him. “It’s a lot to take in all at once, I get it. I’m not gonna get offended, or whatever.”

He expects a thousand questions all at once - that was certainly how _he_ felt - but Ben surprises him by nodding slowly and saying nothing. It’s quiet - quiet enough to hear the crickets chirping in the distance.

“Were you born with your powers?” Ben asks first.

Richie snorts, and Stan elbows him in the ribs. “No,” Eddie says, ignoring them both. “It was an accident. Has anyone told you about the Standpipe since you moved here?”

Recognition sparks across Ben’s face. “It partially collapsed a few years ago, right? I read about it, I saw the design in an old textbook at the library. It talked a lot about how structurally sound it was supposed to be, it even had drawings -”

“I’m sure it _was_ structurally sound,” Stan says drily, “before Eddie blew it up.”

“I did not _blow it up,_ ” Eddie mutters as Ben’s jaw drops. “I _got_ blown up. I was _also_ a victim, it was the Standpipe _and_ me.”

“Just admit you committed an act of domestic terrorism against the entire town of Derry at age ten, Eds, we _all_ know that’s why you’re _claiming_ to not remember anything -”

A smile twitches at his lips, and then he snorts. “You’re the least funny person I know, Richie,” he says primly, and it does not dim Richie’s grin in the slightest. “Sorry,” Eddie grimaces at Ben, who just shrugs, jaw still hanging. “It happened at the end of fifth grade. The four of us were gonna come out here to play for a while, but Richie wanted to go to the Standpipe instead, and I ended up trapped inside by myself and - something happened.”

Ben blinks. “What?”

“That’s the thing,” says Eddie. “I don’t remember much of it. I remember going in and getting trapped and going up to the top of the staircase and then - and then I woke up on the stairs and the whole inner sleeve was falling apart around me.”

“Oh, _wow,_ ” Ben breathes. “So it was an accident?”

“I think so. I really don’t remember anything - I don’t know if I was attacked or if I touched something I shouldn’t have touched or if the whole thing was just a freak accident and I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but, like, I - I probably shouldn’t have survived whatever it was. I probably _wouldn’t_ have survived it if it wasn’t for the powers.”

Bill, Stan, and Richie are all visibly tense in Eddie’s periphery, but Ben is shaking his head - marveling, Eddie realizes. “So you’ve had powers since you were ten?” he asks.

“Yeah - I didn’t realize it until a couple of weeks later, but that was a whole other thing - Stan shanked me twice in, like, an hour -”

“I did not _shank you,_ and it was for _research -_ ”

“Either way, we figured it out the same way I got them to begin with - by accident. And then we came out here and I punched that tree in half.”

Eddie points to the mangled tree stump and watches with a certain amount of gratification as Ben’s eyes flicker toward it and widen. “Wow,” Ben murmurs. “I mean, I figured you had super strength on the bike, but - _wow._ ”

“He can fly, too,” Richie says, bouncing on the balls of feet. “You gotta try it sometime, it’s so much fun.”

Ben shoots Eddie a questioning look. “If you want,” Eddie nods. “But if you’re scared of heights or some shit, I wouldn’t recommend it.”

It earns a laugh from each of them, the sound mingling into a pleasant harmony in Eddie’s ears that echoes on through the trees long after it’s over.

* * *

It’s still ringing in his ears a week later, eyes glazed over and fixated on the blurry shape of the sidewalk moving beneath his feet as he walks. He’s en route to Keene’s Pharmacy to refill his completely useless prescriptions before heading out to the Barrens to meet the others, thoughts drifting lazily to the way Ben kicked his feet out and _laughed_ when his heel caught the edge of the top of the press box the night before. The near-collision would have been entirely Eddie’s fault - he was so distracted by Ben practically wriggling with excitement the moment his feet left the ground that he almost flew them directly into the side of the press box. He’s honestly not entirely sure what would have happened, had they actually crashed - he was going pretty fast, and his grip wasn’t _great_ \- but either Ben had no concept of the very real danger he was almost in, or he trusted Eddie enough to _laugh_ in the face of it. And even though Stan and Richie and Bill had all seen and were whooping down on the football field below, Eddie hadn’t been able to shake the very real pulse of fear at nearly crashing, or the odd, cavernous feeling in his chest that someone important missed it.

The bell over Keene’s front door rings out hollow in the mostly-empty pharmacy. Mr. Keene’s shining bald head is only just visible behind the counter; he hardly spares Eddie a glance over the pills rattling around in the little silver dish on the counter before him. Eddie slinks inside and to the right, toward the little spinning carousel of cheap greeting cards and folded road maps hanging uneven in their display. He eyes the small section of shelves lined with cheap toys longingly - he’s long-since matured enough to differentiate between _want_ and _need,_ but the sight of the shelves still ignites an undeniable ache at the center of his heart that makes him feel like a chastened five year old holding his mommy’s hand again.

A familiar, copper-haired girl comes slowly trailing around the corner of the furthest aisle as Eddie subconsciously lingers at the toy shelves, and he automatically freezes at the sight of her. Beverly Marsh is just as strikingly pretty here in Keene’s flickering fluorescent lights as she is in the dingy middle school hallways. Eddie feels himself staring - knows, on a distant intellectual level, that he probably looks like a slack-jawed idiot - but he can’t bring himself to look away.

Beverly either doesn’t notice him or completely ignores him at first - and given the fact that he spends the majority of his time sticking close to the edges of the hallways in an effort to not be trampled to death between classes and has perfected the art of blending in with the paint on most walls, he’s more inclined to lean toward the former. He knows her, of course - _everyone_ knows her - but he’s never had any classes with her and what he knows is a messily cobbled mosaic of hearsay and obscene graffiti in the bathroom stalls at the middle school. Nothing about her seems blatantly _whoreish_ (a word his mother usually uses in reference to _all_ girls his age that he only just recently learned the real meaning of); her crystalline eyes scan disinterestedly over the products hanging on the endcap as she slowly meanders by, fingers tugging mindlessly at the ruffled neckline of her shirt, pulling it just low enough to reveal the pale, freckled hollow of her throat.

Her gaze naturally slides over Eddie as she turns up the next aisle, and Eddie manages to snap his jaw shut and paste on a polite smile.

She doesn’t smile back, not fully, but the corners of her mouth do twitch - just enough to tease the dimples on her cheeks.

The split-second of kindness leaves Eddie feeling warm and flustered, even after she returns her attention to the merchandise lining the shelves along the next aisle and disappears from view. He turns back toward the toy shelves, huffing out a breath in the face of a worn teddy bear. He’s fairly certain the warmth humming gladly in his veins isn’t actually a _crush_ \- he’s yet to really develop one, as far as he knows, but he’s heard Ben sighing all moony and love-sick over some girl he vaguely describes but refuses to name a few times over the last week, and nothing about this feels like _that._ But - but there is _something_ odd happening in the pit of his belly, something dually unsettling and joyful, something that lurches each time he enunciates the syllables of her full name in his mind.

_Beverly Marsh. Beverly Marsh._

“Oh, shit,” a familiar, snotty voice hisses somewhere behind Eddie. “Were you just flirting with the scrawny little Kaspbrak kid?”

Eddie freezes, back still turned, ears pricked desperately.

“What are you talking about?” Beverly asks - sounding just as disinterested as she looked a moment earlier.

“Oh, my god, are you fucking _him, too?_ God, I knew you were a slut, but I didn’t know you were such a _charitable_ slut. God knows no one else was _ever_ going to -”

“How about you shut the fuck up, you unbearable asshole?” Beverly interrupts - voice curiously calm. “Who the fuck even says he’d want _you_ , or _anyone else_ at that shitty school? You are really just such a bitch.”

Several things happen at the same time in the seconds that follow:

Eddie feels a familiar, sharp tug around his naval, pulling at him directly from behind.

A curious sound like a hand cutting through air roars in Eddie’s ears.

Beverly gasps sharply and the noise immediately etches itself into Eddie’s long-term memory.

The entire shelving unit to Gretta Keene’s right comes crashing down on top of her.

Eddie spins around just as Gretta collapses beneath the weight of the shelving unit, her shrill, nasal cries ringing through the pharmacy. Beverly leaps backwards - the shelves missed her by a hair, but she still steps on some of the fallen merchandise and nearly loses her balance. Before he can even process what’s happening, Eddie’s shooting forward and catching her around her shoulders - far, _far_ too quickly to pass off as coincidental.

Beverly falls backwards into the crook of his arm, and Eddie holds her steady there at the end of the aisle; they stand in a kind of frozen dance move, Eddie dipping Beverly toward the ground, staring at each other through wide eyes as Gretta’s cries reach deafening decibels.

“Uh,” Eddie grunts.

“Holy shit,” Beverly breathes.

Suspecting. _Knowing_.

Mr. Keene chooses that exact moment to appear in a red-faced blur at the other end of the aisle, beady eyes sparking with rage as he quickly absorbs the scene before him. “You little rat bastard hooligans!” he shouts, and Eddie quickly heaves Beverly back to her feet. Beverly immediately backs up behind Eddie, her face pale and alarmed - but her gaze is on Mr. Keene. She wraps both hands around Eddie’s right arm and tugs, pulling him along with her as she backs down the aisle. “Get out! Get out of my store before I call the police!”

It’s a mad dash from there, Eddie and Beverly practically slamming into a protruding wire display at the far end of the aisle in their haste to escape. Beverly lets go of his arm but stays close, her shoulder brushing against his as they tumble out of the front door and take off down the sidewalk away from downtown. They run several blocks together, loud pants mingling with the sounds of their tennis shoes slapping along the concrete, until they pass Freese’s and stumble to a halt at the corner of Main and Kansas Street.

Beverly doubles over, her hands on her knees, struggling to catch her breath. Eddie leans against the corner of the Freese’s building, wary gaze darting between traffic bustling by on Main and Beverly slowly regaining her composure.

“Holy shit,” Beverly says again - louder now that they’re outside. Eddie lets out a loud, bursting exhale, and tries not to squirm as Beverly immediately turns an intense, burning stare toward him. “What the hell _was_ that, back there?”

He tries desperately to ignore the cold feeling in his throat. “I, uh, what’re you talking about?”

She arches a pale brow, and the psychological _need_ to squirm under the weight of her gaze quadruples. “Did - did you - I mean,” she stops and frowns. “Did you do that? With the shelves. Did you -”

She flattens her hand and makes a tilting motion with it, and he swallows hard. He could lie. He could posture that he has absolutely no idea what she’s talking about. His back was turned when the shelves flipped - he’s got plausible deniability on his side. Catching her when she nearly fell might be a bit harder to explain, but he’s pretty sure he had decent reflexes before the Standpipe and it’s not _so_ unbelievable that he could have dived down the aisle and caught her without the influence of any superpowers.

But she’s looking at him like she can see directly through him - like there’s some part of her that already knows the truth - and something, _something_ is stirring in the pit of his gut. Something indignantly crying out for Beverly to _know_ , the same something that looked at Ben’s bike piled on top of his and thought _yes, right, good._

“Yes,” he says stiffly, and watches surprise flicker through her eyes. “Yes, yeah, I - yes.”

She blinks rapidly - once, twice, in time with his pounding heart. “How?”

He inhales through parted lips and ignores the way humidity catches in his airway. “I -” he stops and laughs, a short, nervous sound dredged up from somewhere near the center of his chest. “I have...powers.”

More surprise - but beyond that, a fundamental lack of disbelief. “Powers?” she repeats - curious, not scornful. “As in, multiple?”

He nods.

She tilts her head to one side, and this time, her smile lights her entire face, and Eddie thinks _beautiful._ “I - huh. And you - you just - you’re just telling me?”

He shrugs, trying and failing to ignore the heat rising in his cheeks. “S’not like I had much of a choice,” he mutters. “You saw me.”

“You could’ve lied.”

And he can’t really argue with that, so he just shrugs again and says “yeah.”

She eyes him closely. “What’s your name, again?”

“Eddie. Eddie Kaspbrak.”

She sticks out her hand, and he shakes it. Her grip is firm and warm. “Beverly Marsh.”

“Yeah, I - I know who you are. I’ve seen you around.”

She drops his hand as something unpleasant shifts in the back of her gaze, but it’s gone in a split-second. “And you’re just - you’re totally fine with basically a complete stranger knowing you have powers?”

He rocks forward to the balls of his feet. “You’re not a stranger,” he says after a moment. “You’re Beverly Marsh. I just told you I know who you are.”

“If you know who I am, then you know what people say about me. You know the rumors. My reputation.”

He glances down at his toes and bites the inside of his cheek. “In my experience,” he says slowly, “rumors are always bullshit. And, I don’t know. I don’t care about your reputation. I - I trust you.”

She’s still looking at him with blatant, open curiosity when he gathers the courage to meet her eyes again. “But you don’t _know_ me,” she says softly.

He shrugs. “Don’t need to. I can tell.”

“Is that one of your powers?”

“No, this - this is just me. It’s a gut thing. I just know.”

“Well - well. Okay. Thanks.”

Eddie flashes her a tentative smile, and after a moment, she mirrors it. “Don’t mention it. Seriously, don’t.” She laughs at that, and he’s delighted to find that Beverly’s laugh is almost as bright and wild as Richie’s. She’d fit, he thinks - she’d fall right into place in their circle, with her bright wild laugh and her stony disinterest and her rumors and her reputation. That feeling of rightness is reaching a fever pitch in his belly, a primal thing whining its desperate bone-deep _need_ for her, the crown jewel of the toy shelves.

“Hey, uh - I know this is kind of random since we just met, but - I was about to go down to the Barrens with some of my friends. We’re - we’re building a clubhouse.” Beverly’s brows lift in interest. “D’you maybe wanna hang out with us?”

She purses her lips, considering. “Who’s ‘us?’”

“Me, Bill Denbrough, Richie Tozier, Stan Uris, and Ben Hanscom?”

“Sure,” she says without hesitation. “I don’t have much else going on at home, I just have to be home by four. Do they - do they know about -?”

She gestures vaguely at him, and Eddie snorts. “Yeah,” he says, turning left and beckoning for her to follow. “Bill, Richie, and Stan were all there the day it happened, and then I told Ben last week after - well.”

“After what?”

Eddie glances over both shoulders, finding the sidewalk otherwise deserted. “After I kinda saved him in an alley,” he says, voice lowered just in case. Beverly’s face immediately pinches in concern, but Eddie waves her off. “He’s fine - Henry Bowers did a number on him, but they heard me coming and ran off and then I healed Ben.”

“You can _heal people?_ ”

“Yeah, I told you - _powers,_ as in _multiple_. I can heal myself and I can heal other people, but healing other people takes a lot of energy and wipes me out for a few minutes. I can also fly, and I can shoot fire with my hands. Oh! And I can, like, levitate things, too. That’s how I flipped the shelves.”

“Shut _up._ How did it happen?”

He launches into the story, and Beverly proves to be an excellent audience - she’s quiet and thoughtful, but still gasps and exclaims in all the right places. Eddie’s really getting into it by the time they reach the Barrens, waving his hands around as he describes the satisfying sounds of a tree splitting from the trunk. Beverly laughs - bright and wild and _loud,_ ringing out through the trees - and from the top of the hill, Eddie sees several familiar faces peering out between the bushes at the sound.

“Hey, guys!” Eddie calls, and Stan raises a hand in greeting.

They’re standing in a loose semi-circle when Eddie and Beverly crest the hill, expressions varying degrees of trepidation. Ben is staring at Beverly like he’s never actually seen a human girl before, and Bill is glancing anxiously between Beverly and Eddie, and Richie appears to be on the verge of physically inserting himself between Eddie and Beverly. Only Stan seems to have some semblance of level-headedness; he grants Beverly a polite smile, before turning a subtly questioning gaze to Eddie.

“This is Beverly,” Eddie says, and Beverly lifts her hand in a tiny wave. “I - uh, well, I kind of told her about - me.”

All four of them inhale at the same time, but only Stan seems to release it right after. “About - what, exactly?” he asks cautiously.

“She knows, guys. She saw. I kinda flipped an entire shelf thing at Keene’s and - she definitely saw.”

“Sorry,” Beverly murmurs, oddly red-faced.

“Well,” Stan says after a moment, “that’s one way to reveal yourself, I guess.”

“D-did anyone e-eh-else see?”

“I...I don’t think so? My back was turned -”

“It wasn’t obvious that it was Eddie,” Beverly says quietly. “I can’t even explain why I knew it was, it was just, like...a feeling, I guess.”

“Why’d you flip a shelf?” Stan asks curiously.

“I didn’t really do it on purpose,” Eddie grumbles. “Gretta Keene was about to - it was just instinct, I didn’t even really realize what was happening until it happened.”

Bill steps forward and Beverly’s attention snaps to him at once; Eddie angles himself toward Bill, too, watching closely as Bill draws himself up to his full height. “If Eh-Eddie trusts you, s-suh-ho do w-we,” he says, “b-buh-buh-but you can’t t-tuh-tell a- _anyone._ No one else kn-nuh-knows.”

“So if people _do_ find out, we’ll know it was you who told,” says Stan - somehow mildly threatening and agreeable at once.

It’s more or less the same conversation they had with Ben last week, only this time Ben is leveling a very serious stare at Beverly on Stan’s other side, and Richie’s stepping up beside Eddie and laying a warm, steady hand over Eddie’s shoulder. Beverly watches them all in turn, eyes wide but unflinching. “I’m not gonna say a word,” she says quietly. “It’s not like anyone would believe me if I did, but hell no, I’m not gonna say anything. Eddie’s - well. I haven’t exactly known him for very long, but I can tell he’s one of the good guys.”

Richie squeezes his shoulder, and Eddie resists the urge to hide his flushed face behind his hands.

Bill nods, satisfied. “H-huh-how much did you t-t-tuh-tell her, Eh-Eddie?”

“Most of it.” He shrugs Richie’s hand off of his shoulder and turns, flashing Beverly a reassuring smile. “I was just telling her about the tree.”

“Ah, the tree,” Stan says a bit longingly, a faint smile turning the corners of his lips up. “The tree you almost set on fire or the tree you punched in half?”

“I know he _seems_ harmless,” Eddie murmurs to Beverly, “but remember - he’s also the psychotic asshole who shanked me.”

“Oh, my god, I did _not -_ ”

“ _Twice._ ”

Stan sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose between his forefinger and thumb, and Beverly giggles. “We started making the clubhouse,” Richie says - the words bursting out like a geyser breaching earth. “We’ve been digging all afternoon - real convenient of you to show up late, _guy-with-super-strength_ -”

“I’m _so sorry_ I had to go by the pharmacy to get medication I don’t need anymore to keep my insane mother off my back while you dug a _hole in the ground,_ Richie, that must’ve been _so hard_ for you -”

“Not _nearly_ as hard as your mother made me last night -”

“ _Fuck you!_ I’m gonna bury you alive in that hole, you dug your own _grave!_ ”

Richie lets out a delighted shriek as Eddie tackles him, laughing breathless and taunting in equal measure as Eddie pins him in the dirt. He’s only exerting a fraction of his strength - he’s certain he could break bones between his fingers if he really tried - but Richie fights back all the same, yanking and struggling and kicking and _laughing._ And Beverly laughed at the thought of him splitting a tree with his hands, and Ben laughed last night, too, when Eddie nearly crashed them into the press box, laughed like he was having the time of his life, and -

Richie manages to flip them in Eddie’s sudden distraction, pinning Eddie so quickly Eddie has no time to brace himself before Richie lurches down and blows a raspberry against his neck. Eddie shrieks and hurls Richie off of him, sending his flailing body flying three feet back and tumbling through the dirt.

Richie’s laughter mingles with Bill’s, Stan’s, Ben’s, and Beverly’s, and after a moment of belligerent scrubbing, Eddie feels his own disgruntled façade crack with the force of his shoulders shaking in unrestrained laughter.

* * *

There is, Eddie thinks, really nothing to this whole superpowers thing. Aside from entertainment purposes, lighting Richie’s (and now _Beverly’s_ ) stupid cigarettes with tiny middle finger flames, and occasionally healing himself or one of his friends, they’re just kind of _there_ , a constant but mostly easy to ignore presence in the back of his mind.

Except for the tugging sensation, when it happens.

He realizes about three days after Beverly joins their little ragtag group that he’s never actually told any of them about the tugging sensation. He realizes this as Beverly is recounting the story of how she met Eddie from her own perspective, rife with details that have every single one of them - including Eddie - hanging from her every word. “- being a total _bitch_ ,” Beverly’s saying, eyes flashing at the memory of Gretta Keene’s words. “Not just to me, but to Eddie, too. So I called her out on it and I swear to god, it was like slow-motion - she went to go swing her hand back to, like, slap me or whatever, and the next thing I knew the shelves were falling directly on top of her. I jumped back because I didn’t wanna get flattened, but I almost fully wiped out over something that fell off the shelves. But before I could actually fall, Eddie was right there catching me, like _magic_.”

Stan, Bill, and Richie all laugh, while Ben grins widely and glances at Eddie. “Spaghetti Man to the rescue!” Richie crows.

His voice is loud enough to echo up from the greenish water glittering in the quarry below the cliff where they’re sitting in a loose circle; the echo somehow intensifies the heat burning at the tips of Eddie’s ears. “Shut _up,_ ” Eddie mutters, “ _stop calling me that._ ”

“Deny it all you want, that name _will_ catch on,” Richie promises after sticking his tongue out at Eddie. “I’ll _make it_ catch on if it’s the last thing I do, mark my words. Stanley! Mark my words!”

Laughter ripples through the group as Stan rolls his eyes but begrudgingly pretends to write Richie’s words across his own palm with his finger.

“And then Mr. Keene was right there screaming at us, so we booked it out the front door,” Beverly continues, wiping tears of laughter off her cheeks. “God, it was insane. I _still_ don’t know how you knew to flip the shelves right at that moment, I could’ve sworn your back was turned the whole time.”

Eddie shrugs, flushing.

“Actually,” Ben pipes up, “I’ve been wondering about that, too. How’d you know I was in that alley when Bowers attacked me? You ran up like you knew exactly where I’d be.”

Five pairs of curious eyes land on his face, and Eddie swallows down the urge to squawk at their scrutiny. “I - I dunno,” he says, tucking his hands beneath his thighs to hide the way they shake. “I just - I guess it was just instinct?”

“You got a weird look on your face right before you found Ben,” Stan says thoughtfully. “Like one second you were yelling at Richie, and the next you looked like you were about to -”

“Barf,” Richie finishes, grinning at Stan’s noise of disgust. “You did. You got all pale and still. I thought for sure you were gonna barf right there on the sidewalk all over our shoes.”

“You got really still right before the shelves fell, too,” Beverly adds. “I thought it was just because you could hear what Gretta was saying, but now…”

“I just - I don’t know how to explain it,” Eddie says, jaw stiff. He fixes his gaze to the reddish dirt between them. “It’s like...okay. Like if you wrap a belt around something and then pull on the belt?” He glances up to varying degrees of confusion, but presses on when Stan nods in complete understanding. “It felt like that. Like - like something in me could sense that you guys needed my help and started tugging me toward you. It led me straight to Ben before I even knew what was happening, and I felt it right before Gretta went to slap you, Bev. I didn’t even have to think about it, I just followed it both times.”

“Almost like a safety alarm for when people are in danger,” Stan says, and Eddie quickly nods. “That makes sense. D’you - I mean, do you feel them a lot?”

“Only twice,” Eddie holds up two fingers and then points to Ben and Beverly with them.

“So like...you didn’t feel anything when Betty Ripsom…” Beverly’s voice trails, and a tense silence descends across the group. Betty went missing the day after Eddie and Beverly met in the pharmacy; already, her missing posters are plastered all throughout town. Eddie swallows hard, trying to banish the image of Betty’s grainy, smiling yearbook picture from his mind.

“No,” Eddie rasps after another moment. “I - I don’t think so, at least. Nothing I can remember, nothing like what I felt with you and Ben.”

“I’m sure it was d-different,” Bill says, shifting forward far enough to place a consoling hand on Eddie’s knee. “Y-you were much c-cluh-hoser to Ben and B-Bev when y-you felt it. The R-Rih-Ripsoms live on the o-other side of t-tah-hown.”

“Yeah,” Eddie agrees, doubt receding like an ebbing tide at Bill’s ever-unshakable confidence. “Yeah, you’re probably right.”

Three hours later, Eddie’s in the process of flying his water-logged friends back up to the cliff for their third jump into the quarry. They’re all stripped to their underwear and are absolutely soaked to the bone from several rounds of chicken fights and splash wars; each one of them is breathless and grinning. He can practically feel the sun kissing freckles across his bare shoulders and the summer heat curling his dripping hair almost as forcefully as it curls Stan’s beneath Eddie’s chin as he flies. Stan kicks his legs out and pretends to run through open air, and Eddie laughs, feeling weightless in more ways than one.

And then his gut twists so sharply, Eddie nearly loses his grip around Stan’s chest.

“ _Eddie?_ ” Stan shouts over the wind - legs still kicking, but in more of a panicked, flailing movement now. Eddie opens his mouth, but his gut twists again and all that escapes is a grunt and a gasp.

Stan stumbles a little once his feet hit solid ground on the cliff, but Eddie can hardly pay him any mind; he drops immediately to his knees and crosses his arms over his gut, eyes screwed shut and teeth bared in pain. He’s aware of his friends speaking in sharp, concerned tones, and of their warm, slick hands pressing against his shoulders and his back, but the sensations are muted - he can hear other voices, too, familiar in a more bone-chilling way, punctuated by the distinctive sounds of fists pounding into flesh.

“ _Eat that meat, you fucker!_ ” Bowers bellows in Eddie’s ears.

“ _Eat it, pussy!_ ” Belch screams.

“ _Eddie!_ ”

Richie’s frantic voice cuts through the disembodied grunts of pain; Eddie wrenches his eyes open to find his entire field of vision blocked by Richie’s face, just inches from his own. Richie has a firm grip on Eddie’s shoulders, and even as Eddie forces himself to focus on Richie’s frantic face, Richie shakes him a bit desperately. “Eddie, what’s wrong?”

He can still hear the sounds of the struggle, like his brain is caught between two radio stations; he manages a quiet, strangled humming sound before he lurches toward the pile of their discarded clothing and seizes at the bright red fabric of his running shorts. He quickly scrambles up to his feet and yanks them over his legs, ignoring the uncomfortable slide of dry fabric against his wet skin and the sounds of rising confusion behind him. They’re all calling his name, and Richie’s desperately pulling at his shoulders even as Eddie yanks the first shirt he can find over his head. He can’t find his socks, but that’s fine - he just shoves both bare feet into his shoes and doesn’t bother tying them, pausing only long enough to dislodge Richie’s hands from his shoulders before kicking off hard from the cliff into open air.

Despite the fact that they all immediately start screaming after him, their voices fade quickly into the wind whistling in his ears. Eddie flies on auto-pilot, focusing only on the painful twisting yank in his gut and the direction it leads him. The Barrens streak into a dark green and brown blur beneath him, and then the Barrens give way to the muted, sun-bleached colors of the dump, and then Eddie’s rocketing over the smoky trainyard. He’s made it all the way to the other side of town in under a minute, which is probably some kind of record that he would normally care about. Under the current circumstances...

He spots them - Bowers, Belch, and Victor Criss - at the edge of the stream that skirts around the perimeter of the trainyard, huddled around a writhing body on the ground. Eddie lands hard on the sharp incline across the stream and sprints toward them, bending to scoop up a large rock just as Bowers straddles the kid and lifts his own rock, murder in his eyes.

Eddie hurls his rock before he allows himself to think about it and nails Bowers right in the forehead, knocking him sideways off the kid - Mike Hanlon, Eddie recognizes him now. Mike seems frozen with shock, turned to watch Bowers collapse in the dirt before twisting around and squinting at Eddie. Belch and Victor are both stunned silent; Eddie heaves for breath as Mike scrambles across the shallow stream toward him, the splashing sounds quick and aborted over the soundtrack of a train engine rumbling somewhere nearby and the breeze hissing through the trees.

“What the _fuck,_ ” Bowers spits when he manages to sit up. His eyes are unfocused a little glassy, but he seems to register Eddie when Eddie reaches to help Mike up the embankment and then steps in front of him, between him and Bowers. “Seriously? The fuckin’ _wheezy_ kid?”

“ _Leave him alone,_ Bowers.” Eddie snarls through clenched teeth.

Belch and Victor both help Bowers up to his feet, but Bowers smirks casually, apparently unaffected by the shallow cut on his forehead bleeding profusely down the side of his face. “You’re trying a little too hard, girly-boy,” says Bowers, stooping to grab another rock from the riverbed. Belch and Victor quickly do the same. “Been hangin’ around the Derry fairy for too long. Guess I should’a known you’d be into fuckin’ black guys, you n-”

Eddie doesn’t remember bending down to grab another rock, nor does he remember throwing it, but he supposes that must be what happened - he blinks and Bowers is flat on his back again, a new cut to his forehead, more blood dripping down his face. He’s acutely aware of Mike sprawled out on the ground behind him; carefully, he adjusts his stance, angling himself to cover as much of Mike as he can. Victor blinks down at Bowers, dazed, and Belch lets out a displeased roar and hurls his rock at Eddie.

Eddie ducks and the rock whistles over his head - it’s all chaos from there, Eddie throwing as many rocks as quickly as he can while dodging the ones they fire back at him, fueled by the rage simmering incandescent just beneath the surface of his skin. A rock clips his left ear and another connects harshly with his right shoulder, but he can hardly feel the pain; everything, every last ounce of his tunnel-vision focus, hinges on the figures on the other side of the stream. He reaches down into the water to grab a particularly large rock -

\- and his forehead splits open just to the right of center. Eddie staggers backwards, gasping at the sensation of warm blood pouring down his face and mingling with now frigid quarry water on his brow; Belch grins, victorious.

The next several seconds play out like a scene in a movie on screen. Eddie watches from outside his own body as his mouth drops open and he screams - the sound deeper and louder than his body should be able to produce - and the sound rumbles the ground beneath their feet. Bowers, Belch, and Victor go still and wide-eyed, rocks slipping from their dirty, dripping hands as Eddie rises up, feet leaving the ground, and hovers a foot over the water’s babbling surface. Both hands burst into flame and everyone - Mike included - scrambles backwards in fear. Eddie rises up slowly, eyes glowing gold-white, fixated on Bowers even as he passes six feet in the air. Bowers trips and splays backwards in the dirt and Belch and Victor disappear into the trees; his chest heaves and he blinks blood out of his eyes, staring up at Eddie in complete and unadulterated terror.

Eddie slams back into his own body just as his body slams back into the earth, knees and fists planted deep in the dirt on either side of Bowers’ shaking form, and Bowers honest-to-god _whimpers_ . “Don't _ever_ come near me or my friends again,” Eddie growls, unsettlingly quiet even to himself. “Do you understand me?”

Bowers nods, trembling violently.

“I can’t _hear you._ ”

“I-I - I understand.”

“Get out of here.”

Eddie shoves himself up to his feet and steps backwards, sneering down his nose as Bowers clumsily scrambles toward the treeline into which Belch and Victor vanished. He’s tangentially aware of the blood still dripping down his own face as he watches Bowers go; the rush of sheer screaming adrenaline in his head begins to fade as the quiet presses in again, leaving room for new, sharp aches and pains lighting his nervous system to register. His skin prickles uncomfortably, and Eddie stays tense, dark eyes scanning the treeline.

He could be imagining it, but really, it feels like someone’s still watching him.

“Eddie,” Mike calls, and Eddie lets his shoulders slump; the prickling sensation vanishes at once. Slowly, he turns, and Mike is on his feet again at the water’s edge. He doesn’t look particularly terrified out of his mind; more like mildly concerned, mildly confused. “Are you - are you okay?”

Eddie shrugs - it’s honest, if nothing else. “Are _you?_ ”

Dirt and blood and saliva are smeared all across Mike’s face; from the looks of it, his lip is split and he’ll have a spectacular black eye by the time the sun rises tomorrow morning. Mike smiles a little ruefully and mirrors Eddie’s shrug. “He’s done much worse before,” Mike says, reaching out a hand when Eddie starts to pick his way through the water. Eddie reaches to take it, but pauses when he sees Mike hesitate. His eyes flick down to Eddie’s outstretched hand. “Is it - is it gonna, uh, catch on fire again?”

Eddie snorts in spite of himself. “Not if I don’t want it to.”

Mike grins and fully extends his hand again, and Eddie takes it gratefully. His limbs feel heavy and sluggish, so he sits down a bit heavily once he’s out of the water, and Mike quickly follows suit. Mike’s knee overlaps Eddie’s thigh. “So,” says Mike, “that was...unexpected.”

Eddie winces. “Yeah, that was not how these things usually go.”

Mike turns his head, eyebrow quirked. “What do you mean?”

“I mean I - I normally show up either right before or right at the end. Like, _after_ the fight has already happened, or before it starts, y’know? Never in the middle.”

“D’you... _do_ this kind of thing often?”

“No, no, this is only the third time. Shit, dude, I’m sorry - I, uh, I have superpowers.”

Mike nods slowly, chewing the inside of his cheek. “I kinda figured,” he says after a moment.

“I can heal you,” Eddie says, gesturing to Mike’s face. “I just need a minute. I’m _really_ tired and healing other people kinda takes it out of me.”

“I’m...I’m not in any rush,” Mike says, sounding a bit bemused. “Take your time.”

Eddie hums, eyes drifting closed. “How’d you know my name?”

He hears Mike snort. “Small town,” he says, “plus, I’ve seen you reading on the grass across the street from my church a few times before.”

“Oh,” Eddie’s face burns with embarrassment, but Mike is grinning when he opens his eyes. “I’m sorry, I -”

“No, it’s okay, it’s not a big deal. The reverend thinks it’s nice. He’s gonna introduce himself to you the next time he sees you out there.”

“I like listening to the choir practicing,” Eddie mumbles. “It’s nice. I don’t get to listen to a lot of music at home, and I can only handle so much of my other friends’ stuff. The voices are nice.”

“My mom’s in the choir,” Mike says, a note of pride in his voice. “They compete sometimes, mostly regional stuff, but I think next year they’re gonna get to go to New York City. They’re really good.”

“That’s really cool,” Eddie says honestly. He’s never been to New York City, but he’s pretty sure his dad used to go sometimes for business, back before he got sick. “I think I’d like to go there someday.”

Mike smiles a little wistfully. “I’d like to go to Florida,” he says.

Eddie pulls a face. “What’s in Florida?”

“Beaches.”

“We got beaches in Maine, Mike.”

“Not like the beaches in Florida. The water’s crystal clear and the sand is white as snow. My daddy showed me pictures of the time he went down there before I was born, and they’re _beautiful_. Nothing like the beaches here.”

Mike’s expression is now fully blissed out, apparently completely lost in the daydream unfolding in his mind; Eddie feels a fond smile twitching at his own lips, and when Mike snaps back to attention a second later, he mirrors it.

“So,” Mike says again, “does anyone else know?”

“My friends, Bill Denbrough, Stan Uris, and Richie Tozier, ‘cause they were there the day I got ‘em. And now Ben Hanscom and Beverly Marsh know, too, but they just found out pretty recently. And, uh, you too. And Bowers and his gang.” The realization slides like slime down his spine; Eddie gasps and draws his knees up to his chest, panic seizing at his senses, static expanding in his head. “Oh, _shit, Bowers knows._ ”

“Hey, hey,” Mike places a large, warm hand on Eddie’s back; Eddie wants to lean into it and shove it away at the same time. “It’s okay, Eddie, don’t worry. _No one’s_ gonna believe them, and I doubt they’re gonna wanna tell everyone about little Eddie Kaspbrak kicking all their asses.”

“Because of my _fucking superpowers_ -”

“You were kicking their asses without them,” Mike says with a dismissive wave of his other hand. “I was more scared of you throwing rocks than I was when you were about to throw literal fire. Is that weird?”

Eddie laughs, the sound tight and strained in his chest. “A little,” he says as Mike rubs his back encouragingly.

“I stand by it,” Mike says with a shrug. “Nothing’s gonna happen, but even if something _does_ happen, I’ve got your back. Don’t worry.”

Eddie sniffles - he’s not sure when he started crying, dammit - and then smiles, small and grateful. “Thanks,” he mutters, quickly wiping the heels of his hands against his cheeks. Most of the heaviness has faded from his limbs now; with one last deep breath, he turns to face Mike a little more head-on. “Okay. I’m ready, now.”

Mike’s hand falls from Eddie’s back, his expression faltering. “Does it - uh, what does it feel like?”

Eddie frowns. “Like wind? I don’t know. It doesn’t hurt.”

Mike hesitates a moment longer, before nodding and shifting a little closer to Eddie. “What do I need to do?”

“Nothing, but I have to touch you. Is that okay?”

“Yeah.”

Eddie grasps Mike’s extended arm with both hands. That same familiar tingling sensation creeps down his arms at once, accompanied by a smooth, strong breeze; Mike gasps, the lacerations and bruises across his face glowing gold before vanishing.

“Whoa,” he breaths, lifting both hands to his face when Eddie releases his arm. Eddie grins tiredly, sinking back to rest his weight against his hands as Mike carefully prods at his own skin. “That was so weird. That was _so weird._ I’m not bleeding anymore, am I?”

“Nope.”

Mike blinks, still feeling around his face, and then drops both of his hands to his lap. “Can you heal yourself, too?”

“Yeah,” Eddie says, “but healing other people takes a lot of energy and I kinda have to, like, rest for a minute before I can use my powers again. Or stand up without almost passing out. I’ll be fine, I just need another minute.”

Mike hums and opens his mouth, but his response is lost at the distinctive sounds of _something_ moving through the brush behind Eddie. Eddie jerks forward and turns at the same time, the movement yanking uncomfortably at the stiff muscles in his neck; he scrambles backwards into Mike, and Mike clumsily grabs at his arm while simultaneously trying to crab-walk away from the brush. The movement in the brush sounds slithering and slow and even, nothing at all like the sounds of Bowers and his gang crashing through the trees at a staggering run. That prickling sensation is back tenfold, coalescing in his shaking, bleeding hands scrabbling through the dirt and his heart valiantly trying to burst through his thin, bruised chest; the branches are moving, and through the leaves Eddie can clearly see a figure shifting, only just human-shaped.

“ _Eddie!_ ”

Eddie gasps and jerks to the left, squinting up the ridge toward the trainyard and blinking at the sight of Ben silhouetted against the afternoon sky, waving down at him frantically. “I found them!” Ben shouts toward the trainyard. “They’re down here, guys!”

The circulation to Eddie’s fingers pulses back to life as Mike’s grip loosens slightly, and Eddie winces as Ben quickly tramps his way down the incline. Chest still heaving, he snaps back to the brush; the person is gone, now - only the passing breeze shifts the branches.

Eddie sits up straight as Ben reaches them, face pinched and pale and shiny with sweat. Other familiar voices ring out somewhere beyond the ridge over Eddie’s head, and Mike shifts to crouch down beside him on one side as Ben does the same on his other. “Eddie, you’re bleeding,” Ben says softly.

“It’s nothing,” Eddie mutters, quickly wiping the back of his hand across his bloody brow just as Bill and Stan crest the ridge and rush down the incline. “I’m fine, I’ll be fine.”

“Shouldn’t you -”

“I wanna get out of here,” Eddie interrupts loudly, loud enough that both Bill and Stan pause, skidding a little on the uneven terrain halfway down the incline. “I don’t like it down here, I want to go up there and do it.”

Mike and Ben help him to his feet and stick close behind him as he carefully picks his way up the incline, shooting Bill and Stan a tight grimace when he gets within arm’s length of them. He looks up as he passes them, furrowing his brow when he belatedly notices that Bill is shirtless, but before he can comment his gaze lands on Richie at the top of the ridge.

“Holy fucking shit,” Richie chokes, reaching for Eddie. Eddie grabs his hand and lets him pull him the rest of the way up the incline into a fierce hug, stumbling a little when Richie pushes him back three seconds later and holds him at arm’s length. Eddie squirms a little as Richie’s eyes sweep down the length of his body, visibly cataloging the injuries he can see. “Holy shit, Eddie, what the fuck happened?”

“Bowers,” Eddie shrugs.

“Eddie saved my life,” Mike says, panting as he draws even with Eddie and Richie. Beverly - who had been watching, chagrinned, over Richie’s shoulder the entire time - darts around to stand beside Mike, gently squeezing his arm. “Bowers and his friends were about to kill me, but Eddie showed up at the last second and fought them off. You should’ve seen it.”

“That explains why they looked like they got run down by a lawn mower a minute ago,” Beverly mutters thoughtfully.

“They saw,” Eddie says. Richie’s attention snaps back to his face, his concern billowing off of him in tangible waves. “They all did. I - I don’t know what happened. Belch hit me with a rock and I just - I don’t know, I just completely lost control for a second.”

“You used your p-pow-powers in front of th-them?” Bill asks urgently.

Stan smacks Bill in the diaphragm as Richie makes a sharp warning sound between his teeth; Ben and Beverly glance anxiously at a bewildered Mike. “It’s fine,” Eddie says, annoyed. “Mike obviously saw me too, and I _just_ healed him.”

“Is that why you haven’t healed yourself yet?” asks Richie, releasing one of Eddie’s shoulders to gently brush his fingertips against Eddie’s forehead. His touch is light and careful, and once again, Eddie has to consciously fight the urge to lean into it.

“Yeah,” Eddie rasps, eyes falling closed on their own volition. “M’ _tired_.”

“Eddie,” Stan says cautiously as Richie grips both of his shoulders again. “Can we circle back around to _Bowers and his gang seeing you use your powers?_ ”

“It’s probably fine,” Ben says slowly when Eddie grimaces. “I mean, Beverly was right - if they try to tell someone, who’s gonna believe them?”

“I said the same thing,” Mike says.

“E-even if they d- _do_ tell, w-we-we’ve got your b-bah-hack, Eddie.”

Richie squeezes both of his shoulders, and when Eddie opens his eyes, Richie nods in resolute agreement. “Nothin’s gonna happen to you, Eds,” he says softly. “Not while we’re around.”

Eddie smiles, suddenly bolstered at their collective confidence. “Thanks,” he murmurs, before turning his head toward the rest of the group. “Sorry I took off without saying anything earlier, I just - everything happened really fast and, and I - I just knew needed to get here as fast as possible.”

“Was it that tugging thing you were talking about? Did you feel it again?” Beverly asks curiously.

Eddie nods, flashing Richie another small smile before stepping backwards just far enough that Richie’s hands fall from his shoulders. He closes his eyes and feels a rush of wind press against his skin; Beverly, Ben, and Mike are staring wide-eyed when he opens his eyes again, but Bill, Stan, and Richie are grinning in obvious relief. Eddie rubs his fingers across his forehead and feels no pain; his fingers are dry when he pulls them back. “Yeah,” Eddie says, rolling his shoulders and dropping his hand to his side. “It was different this time, though. Before it was just the feeling - I could _hear_ Bowers yelling this time. Like he was right there next to me. And the feeling was way more intense this time, like it almost _hurt._ ”

“It looked like it _did_ hurt,” Stan says, hands in his pockets. “You jerked so hard I thought you were gonna drop me.”

Eddie scoffs, hoping it’s enough to cover the miniscule pulse of guilt in his chest.

“Even if he _had,_ you would’a landed in the water and been _fine,_ Stanley,” Richie snarks.

“I wasn’t gonna drop you,” Eddie says firmly, “but if you had somehow _slipped,_ I would’ve caught you.”

Stan’s eyes narrow suspiciously. “Promise?”

He wants to scoff again - wants to make a joke at Stan’s expense just to ease the clench of guilt around his heart - but something is stirring deep in his gut, the same dark and unidentifiable something he sees shifting in Stan’s gaze. He gets the distinct impression that they’re no longer really talking about accidentally dropping him over the quarry; Eddie bites down on the inside of his cheek and lifts his chin, hoping Stan sees whatever he needs to see in Eddie’s expression. “I swear, Stan.” Eddie says steadily. “I’ll always catch you. All of you. You guys have my back, and I have yours.”

He looks around the group as he says it; six solemn faces look back at him. Bill steps forward, holding Eddie’s gaze for a moment longer before turning to Mike. “I’m B-Bill,” he says, extending a hand for Mike to shake.

“Mike, Mike Hanlon.”

“Buckle up, he’s getting really good at this speech,” Eddie mutters to Mike over Bill’s shoulder.

Bill shakes his head in clear exasperation, the back of his neck flushing a delicate shade of pink even as he squares his shoulders. “I d-don’t know how m-muh-much this’ll count now that B-Bow-wers knows, but y-you can’t t-tell anyone about Eh-Eddie.”

Stan opens his mouth, but Mike’s already talking. “I won’t tell,” Mike says, eyes flicking to Eddie’s face over Bill’s shoulder. “I won’t tell _anyone_. I swear.”

Eddie nods, ignoring Richie’s hand where it brushes against his back.

“G-good,” Bill says after glancing back at Eddie for confirmation. “You’re one of uh-us, now.”

“Welcome to the Losers Club,” Richie chirps. “You gotta check out our clubhouse, we just finished it yesterday. You can help us christen it!”

“Hey, Bill?” Eddie asks as Bill turns to lead the way out of the trainyard.

“Huh?”

“Where’s your shirt?”

Bill shoots a half-incredulous, half-disgruntled look over his shoulder. “L-look down.”

Eddie glances down and flushes - Bill’s shirt is, in fact, currently on his own torso. “Sorry.”

“Yeah, y-your shirt didn’t f-f-fit me. I got a l-luh- _hot_ of w-weird looks.”

Eddie walks alongside Mike, facilitating introductions as they make their way across the trainyard and into the dump, toward the Barrens. Richie walks on Eddie’s other side, piping in his own colorful nicknames for everyone except himself as Eddie talks - “This is Richie, but you can call him _Trashmouth_ ,” Eddie says before Richie can interrupt, shooting a playfully disdainful glance at Richie.

“I’m gonna get that embroidered on my letterman when we get to high school,” Richie says seriously, eyes flashing beneath his glasses. “Fuck Tozier, call me Richie Trashmouth from now on!”

“And that’s Stan,” Eddie points to Stan while Beverly whoops with Richie; Stan glances backwards and waves over his shoulder. “Now, I know Bill _seemed_ intimidating earlier,” Eddie says as Mike waves back, “but it’s really _Stan_ you have to watch out for.”

“Don’t you _dare_ , Kaspbrak -” Stan half-shouts.

“Why?” asks Mike at the same time.

“ _Stan’s_ the one who shanked me twice in less than an hour in the fifth grade. He’s _ruthless_.”

Mike barks out loud, appreciative laugh, and Stan groans, petulant. “Is this how you’re gonna introduce me to _everyone?_ ”

“Everyone who thinks you’re, like, _nice_.”

Stan _harrumphs_ and flips Eddie off to the sound of Richie’s laughter; it echoes back at them from the wall of trees up ahead.

An invisible weight lifts from Eddie’s shoulders the moment they make their way into the trees. He huffs out a breath of relief and lets his eyes fall closed, content to let Richie bumper him along the narrow walking path for a short stretch. Something about the Barrens has always felt a little bit like home, in a way his mother's house never has; he supposes this is what adults mean when they talk about coming home after a particularly long, wearisome day.

The conversation is loud and chaotic by the time they actually make it to the densely shaded clearing they chose for the clubhouse. Eddie hangs back a few paces, grinning at the sight before him. Friends, old and new, mingled together in an amiable throng; a sense of rightness clicks into place somewhere deep, deep in his gut. Ben pulls the hidden clubhouse door open and Bill starts down the ladder, waving for Mike to follow, while Beverly and Richie jostle each other and an unwilling Stan for who gets to go down the ladder next; Stan catches his eye and lifts his brows in an unvoiced question.

Eddie shrugs and nods, and Stan’s expression smooths out with a small, twitching grin.

Eddie waves the others down first, insisting on going last. Stan’s about halfway down the ladder when the back of Eddie’s neck begins to prickle once more.

He turns around quickly, scanning the trees. Nothing seems overtly out of place - nothing seems to be moving at all, actually, no wind through the leaves or squirrels scurrying over roots or birds fluttering in the trees. Eddie swallows thickly as the prickling intensifies, turning on the balls of his feet.

A flash of movement catches in the corner of his eye and Eddie whips toward it.

A pair of glowing yellow eyes are watching him steadily from a particularly dense cluster of shadowy bushes several yards away, to the right of the clubhouse door. Eddie freezes, blood running ice-cold through his veins, staring right back at black pupils cut to thin slits.

“Eddie?” Stan calls. Eddie glances down at Stan’s mildly concerned face, and then back up - but the eyes are gone. The prickling goes with it, but a heaviness settles like stones in the pit of his gut. “Hey, are you okay?”

Eddie scans the trees a bit frantically, but the stillness is gone, now, too - the trees are shifting lazily with the breeze, the squirrels are chattering amongst the roots, the birds are singing over his head. “Yeah,” Eddie says with a quick shake of his head, stepping down to the top rung. “I’m fine.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Man this chapter was a doozy to write, but I'm SO happy with the way it turned out. I'm pretty sure this chapter alone doubled the word count, lol. So obviously I'm going in a slightly different order than canon, but there is a reason for that. :)
> 
> Let me know what you think so far!
> 
> As always please feel free to come hit me up on [tumblr](elsaclack.tumblr.com)!


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Beverly skirts past Eddie and Stan, her gaze fixated on the back of Bill’s head. “We don’t have to go in there today,” she says softly, palm grazing up his upper arm. “We can wait, we can go in tomorrow -”
> 
> “No,” Bill interrupts. “No, it has to be today.” He turns away from the house and meets Beverly’s gaze before turning to the others. “Look, you guys don’t have to go in there with me. None of you asked for this, and - I’ll understand. But...what happens when another Georgie goes missing? Or another Betty, or another Eddie C.? What happens - what happens when it’s one of _us_? I can’t - I can’t pretend like this isn’t happening the way all the adults keep telling me to. For me, walking into this house will be a hundred times easier than walking into my own house, because my house is the one place I know Georgie _isn’t_. I have to do this. I _need_ to do this. For Georgie.”
> 
> He turns away before anyone can respond, squares his shoulders, and starts back up the path. “Wow,” Richie breathes from somewhere behind Eddie.
> 
> “What?” Ben murmurs.
> 
> “He didn’t stutter once.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings for this chapter: two "off-screen" character deaths, and Alvin Marsh - I kind of fused book!Beverly with movie!Beverly in terms of how she ends up where she is when IT shows up. Only the aftermath of the physical abuse is described, but if that is triggering in any way, skip the paragraph that starts with "Whatever he's expecting to see" and pick back up again at "'Holy fucking shit,' Eddie grits."
> 
> I've also incorporated more of the book elements that the movie omitted to better serve the plot of this specific fic - sorry if that's jarring to anyone. If I've missed something you feel should be tagged, please let me know and I will gladly add it! :)

George Denbrough goes missing on the last Tuesday in June.

Eddie is at home at the time (along with all of the other Losers, though he doesn’t know it yet). A thick band of thunderstorms blow in from the coast and submerge Derry in six inches of rain before eight o’clock in the morning on that fateful Tuesday morning, thoroughly ruining all half-formed plans for every child in town. The rain soaks abandoned streets and peels at the corners of Betty Ripsom’s missing posters and Eddie Corcoran’s just beside hers - his are newer, a little less faded from sunlight, but wilt all the same to a soundtrack of rolling thunder and flashing lightning.

Georgie, Eddie will learn later, left the Denbrough house in his little yellow rain slicker and green galoshes around 10:30 in the morning. He was last seen shortly thereafter on the corner of Jackson and Witcham, chasing a paper boat as it rushed along the curb with the flow of rainwater, headed toward the closest storm drain.

Sharon Denbrough calls Sonia Kaspbrak around noon. Georgie’s always been partial to Eddie out of all of Bill’s friends, and Sharon tells Sonia as much - Eddie can only just catch Sharon’s tinny, muffled words from where he’s eavesdropping from the kitchen. Georgie likes Eddie the best, has been to Eddie’s house before with Bill, so is it possible that maybe Georgie took his boat there to show Eddie?

“No,” Sonia says, and Eddie winces at her dispassionate tone. “Maybe he’s out in the woods where those hooligan boys are always trying to drag my Eddie off to play.”

The fear of the whole situation must be getting to Sharon - she doesn’t even bother pointing out that Eddie’s usually the one leading the charge down into the Barrens, just mutters out a distracted thanks and hangs up. At the sound of the phone clicking back against its cradle, Eddie darts to the counter and clumsily grabs the butter knife he dropped when the phone first rang, barely managing to scoop out enough mayo to spread across the nearest piece of discarded bread before Sonia comes bustling into the kitchen behind him. “Who was it, mommy?” Eddie asks with as much innocence as he can muster.

“Sharon Denbrough,” Sonia sniffs as she pulls the freezer door open. “They’ve lost track of their boy, the littlest one. Serves ‘em right for letting him out to play in this weather, he’ll have caught pneumonia by the time they find him again.”

Eddie frowns down at his half-made sandwich, trying hard to banish the mental image of Betty’s and Eddie C.’s missing posters. He has a creeping feeling that pneumonia is the least of the Denbroughs’ problems.

The storm rages for all of Tuesday and persists into Wednesday evening before the rain finally stops and the clouds break overnight. Thursday morning finds Eddie intercepting a call from Stan before Sonia wakes up, agreeing in hushed, urgent tones to meet at the clubhouse as soon as possible. He sneaks out the front door after scribbling a note to his mother and hurries on his way, bike tires skidding through the mud.

Ben and Stan are in the process of stowing their bikes when Eddie pulls up; they turn to greet him with identical withdrawn, anxious expressions. “Have they found him yet?” Eddie asks breathlessly as he dismounts his bike.

Ben frowns and diverts his gaze. “No.” says Stan.

“ _Shit_.”

“Mrs. Turner said she saw him by that sewer grate outside her house, but she didn’t see what happened to him,” Stan continues grimly. “Apparently he was there, and then she turned around for a second, and when she looked back, he was gone. She didn’t hear anything, either, but there was all that thunder...”

Eddie hears himself let out a strangled groan from the pit of his throat, glancing automatically over his shoulder. “Has anyone talked to Bill?”

“He called this morning and asked me to call around and get everyone to meet here.”

“D’you think - d’you guys think it’s the same thing that happened to Betty and Ed Corcoran?” Ben asks, voice hushed.

Eddie and Stan exchange a look, but before either of them can respond, Richie comes barreling around the corner so quickly his tires squeal and skid on the rain-slicked concrete. “Hey!” he half-shouts, staggering off his bike and straightening his glasses with one hand. His bike falls to the ground behind him in a deafening clatter. “Is Bill here yet?” he asks.

“He’ll be here soon,” says Stan.

“You called Homeschool and Ringwald too, right?”

“I think Bill called Beverly,” Stan says, face pinching with exasperation - between that and Richie’s half-hearted self-satisfied grin, Eddie’s the only one who notices the way Ben’s face falls by a fraction. “But, yes, I called Mike too. I think he’s gonna be late - he said his dad’s really behind on deliveries because of all the rain, but he’s going to make time for this. He knows.”

Richie nods, still panting. “How did he sound? Bill, I mean?”

Stan’s gaze drops to Richie’s feet. “Not good,” he murmurs.

Eddie clenches his jaw in an effort to resist the shiver rumbling up his spine. He thinks he does a pretty good job of it, all things considered - Stan and Ben both appear too lost in their own thoughts to notice - and then he glances at Richie and finds him already looking back at him, watching him with a frown.

“We should head to the clubhouse,” Eddie says before Richie can speak again.

They fall into step down the gentle, grassy slope, Ben leading the way with Stan close behind him. Eddie allows a bit of distance to build between himself and Stan, half-expecting Richie to plow past him the way his long legs would normally carry him, but Richie adjusts his own pace to match Eddie’s at once. Ben’s voice echoes distortedly through the trees, and Richie’s knuckles brush against the back of Eddie’s hand each time their arms swing.

“Are you okay, Eds?” Richie asks quietly.

Eddie bites down on the inside of his cheek, blowing out a breath through his nose in a valiant, ill-fated attempt to staunch the anxiety thrumming in his chest. “I dunno,” he says after a moment. “I mean...no. I’m worried about - about Bill, and Georgie too, obviously. But I just - I dunno, Rich.”

“What?”

Ben and Stan are well out of earshot by then, and when Eddie glances over his shoulder, he finds the slope back up toward their discarded bikes deserted. Richie’s watching him when he meets his eyes, brow furrowed in another frown. “I just - I got a bad feeling about all of this. Like - like something _really bad_ is happening.”

“You mean with all the kids going missing?”

“Yeah.”

“Is it, like - like a superpower feeling, or just -?”

“I don’t know,” Eddie interrupts, turning his gaze forward once more. “I mean, it’s scary. Georgie’s smart for his age, I don’t think he would’ve fallen into that sewer no matter how hard it was raining.”

“He might’ve, if the boat he was playing with got swept away. Maybe he thought he could reach it and he slipped.”

“I dunno, Rich. Something’s off, something just doesn’t feel _right_ about this. I don’t really know how to explain it.”

From the corner of his eye, he sees Richie glance first toward Ben and Stan, and then over his shoulder back up the path, and then he feels Richie’s hand grip firm and warm over his shoulder. “They’re gonna find him, Eds,” Richie says softly. “They got all the cops in Derry looking for him, they’ll find him.”

“Haven’t they been looking for Betty and Ed Corcoran this whole time, too?”

Richie suddenly looks a little stricken as he withdraws his hand, like he had not quite connected those dots on his own just yet. “Maybe they’re together,” he says, and Eddie thinks they’re both choosing to ignore how plainly Richie’s grasping at straws. “Maybe - maybe Betty and Ed found Georgie and they’re - they’re together. Eddie C.’s kind of a dummy, but he’s got this really awesome knife that his dad gave him last year for his birthday and I know he knows how to use it, and - and Betty, Betty’s always working at that daycare over on Plum Street, she’s real good with kids and she’d know how to take care of Georgie until the cops find ‘em.”

Eddie clenches his jaw at the way Richie’s voice wavers like he’s on the verge of tears - _if Richie cries, I’ll lose it,_ he thinks a bit wildly. “You’re right,” he says, wincing at the slightly raspy quality his own voice has taken. “They’ll be okay if they’re together.”

From the corner of his eye, he sees Richie nod; despite not having mind-reading as a power, Eddie knows without asking that they’re both thinking the same thing.

Both Stan and Ben have already descended into the clubhouse by the time Eddie and Richie make it to the clearing, but the door is still propped open; Eddie gestures for Richie to climb down first, and waits until Richie’s feet are firmly planted on the ground before forgoing the ladder and carefully hovering down into the clubhouse, pulling the door closed over his head as he sinks.

“Show-off,” Stan mutters, lips twitching with a smirk.

Eddie flips Stan off, but his heart isn’t in it - and Stan’s smirk quickly flickers and dies. Ben settles on the floor just beside the makeshift swing, leaning back against the support beam there. He alternates between watching Richie anxiously, absently flip through the first comic book he could find and the closed clubhouse door. He’d talked about installing windows this week; he’d shown them in a hand-drawn diagram of his plan, of four narrow little hatch-like things he could dig up through the earth near the roof that would allow for both better air ventilation and a bit more natural light to make it inside so they could rely a little less on their flashlights and gas lanterns. That’s what they were supposed to do on Tuesday, if not for the rain and everything that followed.

“Richie,” Stan calls.

His voice is gentle and soft, but Richie jumps all the same. “Fuck, dude,” he mutters, casting the comic aside with one hand while massaging his chest over his heart with the other. “Warn a guy next time you randomly start yelling in a tiny enclosed space.”

“I didn’t yell,” says Stan calmly.

“It’s not _that_ tiny,” says Ben, vaguely defensive.

Eddie ignores them both, approaching Richie slowly enough that he has time to notice before Eddie actually touches him. Just a soft thing - a brush of his fingertips over the back of his forearm - but Richie watches closely, almost raptly, and his magnified eyes flick up to Eddie’s when Eddie’s hand falls back to his side.

“You good, Rich?”

He can see Richie’s throat working stiffly against a swallow, but he nods.

“Let’s sit. It could be a little while before the others get here.”

Richie follows him to the hammock and only balks when Eddie settles on the ground beside it after gesturing for Richie to climb inside. “I thought -” he starts, before abruptly cutting himself off.

Eddie furrows his brow. “What?”

“Nothing, n-nothing. I just - I didn’t think you liked sitting on the ground, is all.”

He flushes and looks down at his crossed legs, at the damp earth beneath him. The truth is that he _doesn’t_ like sitting on the ground - actually kind of _hates_ the feeling of moisture slowly soaking through his clothes and the tiny ants and spiders he always catches scurrying up his legs - but he dislikes the look on Richie’s face whenever he gets anxious like this even more. He’s been friends with Richie long enough to have figured out by now that for whatever reason, Richie always seems to calm down by at least a fraction whenever someone sits down with him and just _stays_ , so - he can put up with the ground, just this once. “It’s fine,” Eddie grumbles without looking up, cursing his curiously molten face. “It’s just a little dirt, it’ll wash out.”

Richie doesn’t respond, and he’s looking at his own knees when Eddie peers up at him through his lashes; it’s hard to tell, given the angle, but Eddie’s pretty sure he can detect the faintest traces of a smile twitching in Richie’s cheeks.

Mike arrives about five minutes later, chest heaving and face shining with perspiration, but eyes bright and clear. “Sorry I’m late,” he says as he descends the ladder. “My parents didn’t want to let me out today, even to help with deliveries. It was a whole thing, I had to beg.”

A generally sympathetic murmur ripples through the other three. “I told my mom I was going to the library to work on a summer project,” Ben says with a grimace.

“My dad thinks I’m at Richie’s working on my Torah reading,” Stan says, glancing at Richie with a mildly thoughtful look.

Richie snorts. “My parents think I’m at your house helping you with your Torah reading.”

Stan smirks again - more pronounced than before. They all look at Eddie then, and Eddie feels his face burning once again. “My ma was still asleep when I left,” he shrugs. “I left a note saying I’d be back later.”

He feels weirdly self-conscious seeing them all exchange quick glances, like they’re all in on some secret inside joke at his expense, except none of them are laughing. “I have an extra granola bar in my backpack,” Ben says apropos to nothing, grabbing the bag where he’d discarded it to his right and rifling through the open front pocket. “It’s been in there for a couple of days, so it might be a little squished, but it’s still good.”

He tosses it to Eddie, and Eddie catches it automatically and blinks down at it, even more confused than before. “Uh,” he grunts - Stan and Mike are looking determinedly away, and Ben is smiling earnestly, and Richie’s absently kicking the foot hanging over the side of the hammock closer to Eddie, and Eddie’s stomach is empty and rumbling. “Thanks.”

He’s just swallowing the last of the granola bar when the clubhouse door swings open again - Beverly’s battered Docs appear first, and then Bill’s scuffed Chucks once she’s found her footing on the ground.

“Bill,” Mike says as the door falls shut over his head.

Bill looks - he looks like hell, actually. His skin is pale and waxy, almost papery, except around his eyes - it almost looks like he’s broken his nose, so deep are the bruises around both eyes. It’s a balmy, _humid_ ninety degrees out already, but he’s visibly shivering beneath his thin shirt. He looks like even the slightest touch would send him crumbling to dust, and Eddie suddenly feels very selfish for eating the granola bar Ben offered him. It looks like Bill hasn’t even slept, much less _eaten_ since Tuesday, and hates himself a little bit for not thinking to insist Ben save his snack for Bill.

“I th-th-thi-think he’s s-stuh-hill a-alive,” Bill says, and Eddie feels his heart fissure at the desperation in Bill’s voice and the severity of his stutter. “I-I _know_ h-h-huh-he is. I’ve b-b-been l-l-l-loo-ooking at my d-dad’s b-b-blueprints of the s-sewer system, and I th-think - I th-th-think I kn-knuh-hoe where he w-w-w-would’ve e-eh-ended up if he f-fuh-hell in and g-got w-w-wuh-hashed away by the s-storm.” Despite the tremors still wracking his body, he looks to each of them steadily. “I w-want to l-l-look for him. I w-want to f-f-find him.”

Richie sits up a little in the hammock, but otherwise, the room remains perfectly still.

“W-w-will you h-huh-help me?”

“Of course,” Beverly says at once. She steps closer to him and lays a solemn hand on his arm. “Of _course_ , we will.”

“We’ll find him, Bill,” Richie says, clambering a bit awkwardly out of the hammock to approach Bill’s other side.

“Yeah,” Ben agrees, already on his feet. “I’m in, I’m for sure in.”

“Me too.” Mike echoes.

Eddie stands, and Bill’s attention darts to him at once. “I’m definitely in, Bill,” he says, and Bill’s eyes are glassy with unshed tears, but his smile is genuine and hopeful in equal measure.

Stan looks a little apprehensive, but nods all the same when they turn toward him. “We’re not gonna be running around the sewers though, are we?” he asks nervously. “I’ve heard it’s like a labyrinth down there.”

“It’s a good thing we’re bringing our human compass, then,” Richie says, clapping a hand to Eddie’s shoulder while holding Stan’s gaze.

“W-we won’t be i-i- _in_ the s-suh-hewers,” says Bill, “just n- _near_ them. Th-th-there’s a r-run-off p-p-puh-hipe a little f-further d-d-down the r-river, and I th-th-think th- _that’s_ where h-he w-w-would’ve ended up w-with all the r-r-ruh-hain.”

“We can look in the woods around it to see if he’s maybe just wandered off and gotten lost,” Beverly says, glancing back at the others as they nod along.

“I can get up higher,” Eddie says, “as long as they can’t see me from the bridge, I should be able to fly and see if I can spot him. That’ll make it quicker.”

Bill nods, looking very much like a drowning boy who’s been tossed a life line. “Th-thank you,” he whispers.

Eddie knows it’s directed toward the whole group, but Bill’s holding Eddie’s gaze when he says it, and the tips of Eddie’s ears burn a little bit in response.

Bill leads them half a mile upstream, keeping close to the edge of the water all the while. It’s slow-going - more than once the pliant earth gives way beneath someone’s feet, but they make it to the run-off pipe with only Ben wetting his jeans from the knees down after accidentally staggering into the river. The pipe itself is a giant, gaping thing, tall enough that not even the most errant of Stan’s curls would brush the ceiling if he were to step inside; sunlight only makes it in the first few feet, plunging the impossible length of the pipe into impenetrable darkness.

“W-we should s-sp-split up,” Bill says, eyes fixated on the darkness as he speaks. “H-h-huh-half on o-one side of the r-r-river, h-half on the o-other, and Eh-Eddie -”

“Yeah,” Eddie interrupts, kicking off to hover a couple of inches over the ground.

Bill stares down the length of the pipe a moment longer, before seemingly shaking himself out of whatever trance he was in; he glances up at Eddie and nods, resolute.

Bill, Beverly, and Ben take the woods on the side with the pipe, while Richie, Mike, and Stan splash across the river to search the other side. Eddie hovers in the middle, watching both groups slowly disappear into the trees, before heading up higher.

The Barrens unfurl in a lazily unfocused stretch of green beneath him as Eddie rises between branches. Crickets sing a rhythmic, monotone summer chorus that quickly drowns out more familiar voices down below, unflinching in the face of Derry’s latest tragedy, and for a long moment Eddie merely hovers and listens. This sound has served as a soundtrack to their most feral after-school games, this place a wild and untamed backdrop, since before Eddie even learned to ride his bike all those years ago. If he listens hard enough, he can hear his own voice echo back to him, distorted by time through the trees.

He can see the distant border where the Barrens bleed into the dump, as high up as he is now. It all seemed so vast before, an endless stretch of wilderness that promised freedom in the pit of its bottomless maw. Eddie’s heart clenches at the thought of Georgie ending up here, wandering directionless and alone. The notion prickles deep in Eddie’s brain, igniting a fierce determination in the furnace of his belly. If astronauts can see the Great Wall of China from space, surely Eddie will be able to see Georgie from up here.

He drops to hover just below the tops of the trees, scanning the ground carefully as he methodically works his way up and down the length of the far side of the woods in a serpentine pattern. He occasionally catches glimpses of Stan, Mike, and Richie as he flies - they’ve fanned out, trekking through the trees alone but within earshot of each other and calling out Georgie’s name as they move. They all glance up when Eddie’s shadow passes over them; Stan salutes him with two fingers each time.

He touches down in the river after a little while, stooping low to dip his hands in and press them to the back of his sweaty neck for a long, refreshing moment, before kicking off again and heading toward the other side of the woods. It’s getting warmer now, the heat and humidity proving to be a dangerous combination; he closes his eyes and clenches his jaw, hoping wherever Georgie is, he’s at least keeping cool.

Bill, Beverly, and Ben apparently opted to stick together - or, at least, Beverly and Ben did. Eddie spots them a little further north from the pipe, Bill several feet ahead of Beverly and Ben, carefully moving brush around with a long, gnarled stick while Beverly and Ben call Georgie’s name. They glance up when Eddie passes over them, and Bill straightens up when Eddie lands a few yards away. “A-anything?”

“Not yet,” Eddie says apologetically, wincing when Bill’s face falls. “But I only just got to this side. You said his rain slicker is yellow, right?”

“B-b- _bright_ yellow,” Bill nods. “C-c-cuh-han’t miss it.”

“ _Bright_ yellow,” Eddie repeats, and Bill nods again. “Got it. They’re still looking on the other side, too, in case I missed something.”

“Th-thanks, Eddie,” Bill says.

“Yell if you need me,” Eddie says before he kicks off again.

He starts his same methodical flight pattern again, ears straining between the sounds of Georgie’s name echoing from both sides of the river. He spots a small herd of white-tailed deer cantering through the trees not far from the clubhouse and a pair of red cardinals nesting that twitter anxiously when Eddie flies too close, but no yellow rain slicker.

He touches down near an old, fallen tree half-rotted to the earth after about half an hour, overheated and frustrated. He can still hear Bill shouting Georgie’s name, but the others seem to be splashing around down in the river, like they’re trying to cool off before resuming the search. Eddie closes his eyes at the sound of Richie’s voice rise and crack - likely from the strain of yet another impersonation - and heaves a long, heavy sigh.

“ _Eddie_ ,” a quiet voice whispers behind him.

Eddie spins on his heel, eyes wide and darting over the fallen tree and the empty woods beyond it. It’s odd - it almost sounded like Georgie, only _distorted_ , somehow, like Georgie whispered into a whirring fan. Eddie blinks and swallows, taking a step back on instinct.

“Hey, Eddie,” the voice whispers again, and Eddie can feel the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end - the voice is close, but he detects no movement between the trees crowding in on all sides. “Eddie, _Eddie_ \- what’re you looking for, Eddie?”

“Georgie?” Eddie calls hesitantly.

“What’re you _looking_ for, Eddie?” the voice repeats - distorting further, deepening, morphing. “What’re you looking for, Eddie Spaghetti?” it asks in Richie’s voice. Eddie blinks - hadn’t he just heard Richie down in the river? “What’re you looking for? You looking for _me_?”

“Hello?” Eddie half-shouts, and the voice laughs, almost familiar but not quite. Eddie swallows again, takes another fumbling step backwards over uneven terrain as a pair of glowing yellow eyes materialize as if through a thick haze in the dense shadows cast by the fallen tree. Eddie scrambles back in earnest at the sight of it - the bulbous, flaring white heat, the tufts of bright orange hair at the temples and the crown, the cruel, twisted smile parted over elongated and jagged teeth only just visible in the shadows.

“Hullo, Eddie,” the clown - a fucking _circus clown with demon teeth, what the FUCK_ \- whispers. “What’re you looking for?”

Eddie feels his lungs quake against the urge to scream; he clenches his fists and feels flames lick up his forearms. “ _Back off_ ,” Eddie spits, voice steady despite his heart thundering in his chest.

Glowing eyes flick down to his flaming hands and the thing - the _clown, holy fuck_ \- lets out a distorted snarl and shrinks back into the shadows until _only_ the eyes are discernible; they narrow dangerously, evasively, and Eddie takes a faltering step forward and lets the flames grow brighter.

“Eddie?”

Eddie jumps and Beverly reels backwards to his right, her wide eyes fixated on his hands even after he hastily extinguishes both flames. “ _Shit_ , sorry, Bev,” he gasps. “You scared me.”

“Sorry,” she says cautiously. “Are you okay? Is something wrong?”

Eddie hesitates and glances back at the shadows; the eyes are gone. _What the fuck._ “N-no, nothing’s wrong,” he says, turning back toward her. “Sorry, I - I thought I saw something.”

Beverly arches a brow, peering in the same direction. “I’m assuming not Georgie,” she says as she turns back toward him.

“Huh?”

“I mean, I’d hope _that_ wouldn’t be the first thing you’d do if you saw Georgie out here,” she points at his hands, and Eddie flexes his fingers automatically. “So...what’d you see?”

The clown - the eyes - it’s all just shadow now, illuminated enough by the sun overhead to plainly see empty space between the rotted trunk and the ground. He’s almost certain there would be no footprints there if he looked, so, what, he’s just supposed to say _I think I just saw a demon clown right over there_? That’s the easiest ticket to Juniper Hill he could ever buy himself, no questions asked. Right?

“Eddie?”

She looks more than a little alarmed when he blinks back into focus. “Oh, I - I, uh, I thought I saw a bear. I was - I was just trying to scare it off.”

“Oh, shit, d’you think there are bears out here?” she whispers, paling significantly.

“No, no, no, I - there hasn’t been a bear attack in Derry since the sixties, I think,” Eddie says quickly, ignoring the guilt surging through his chest. “I just - I’m pretty sure my mom would kill me if I got mauled by a bear out here, y’know? She doesn’t really like me playing out here, she’s always worried I’ll get sick or get hurt, so. Better safe than sorry and all that.”

Beverly cocks her head a degree, brow furrowed. “Wouldn’t you just be able to heal yourself if you did get mauled by a bear?”

“I’m, like, ninety-nine percent positive I can’t heal myself if I’m dead,” Eddie mutters.

Beverly snorts. “Good point.” Eddie grins as she briefly drops her gaze to the ground between them. “We’re regrouping at the river, Bill wanted me to come find you.”

“Okay. Want a lift back?”

“Please.”

Eddie hooks his arms beneath her armpits and lifts her up, picking up enough speed to blow her damp hair back from her forehead and the back of her neck while still carefully weaving through the trees. She doesn’t laugh the way she usually does - it all feels a little too solemn and intense for laughter - but she is working hard to diminish her broad grin by the time they break through the trees and Eddie gently sets her down in the water.

Bill hurries toward them, desperation eking out of every pore, and Eddie very much wants to cry. “I’m sorry, Bill,” he says softly as Bill splashes closer. “I didn’t see anything on either side of the river.”

Bill’s expression falls by a fraction, but Eddie blinks and finds a steely mask of determination set in its place. “W-w-wuh-we’ll keep l-looking,” he says with as much confidence as he can muster.

“We should eat,” Stan calls from near the pipe. “It’s getting close to lunchtime.”

“M’n-n-nuh-hot hungry,” Bill mutters, trudging through the water toward the pipe.

“You gotta eat, Billy,” Eddie says, hurrying after him. “You won’t be helping anyone if you keel over out here.”

“I don’t give a _damn_!” Bill screams sharply, and Eddie flinches back. “I wanna find Georgie and I’m _not_ gonna stop until I do!”

The rest of the group has gone perfectly still; no one moves an inch as Bill storms through the water toward the drain pipe. Eddie bites down on the inside of his own cheek to drown out the weight of the knot in his throat, the sting of unshed tears pricking at the backs of his eyes. He feels more than sees Beverly draw even with him to his right; her hand is warm and small and gentle when she brushes it over his back, finding purchase on his shoulder and squeezing gently. “He didn’t mean it,” she whispers reassuringly. “That wasn’t about you.”

Eddie nods and clears his throat. “I know,” he whispers back.

Bill has stopped at the mouth of the pipe, his back resolutely toward the group, perfectly framed by darkness. He does not glance back when Eddie finally works the nerve up to approach him. Beverly goes with him, slow and patient, and the others fall in around them when they’re close enough.

“I’m s-s-soh-horry,” Bill murmurs tensely when Eddie draws up beside him. “I’m j-j-juh-just w- _worried_.”

“It’s okay,” Eddie says honestly, “I forgive you.”

The corner of Bill’s mouth twitches, and he glances down at Eddie through glassy eyes. “H-he - he c-c-calls me B-B-Buh-Billy, too.”

“Shit, I -”

“N-nuh-no, I - i-it’s okay. If y-y-y-you do.”

Eddie smiles - small and sad - and reaches up to squeeze Bill’s arm just above his elbow in thanks.

Bill flashes him one last tight-lipped smile of his own before returning his attention to the depths of the pipe; he studies the darkness closely as he reaches back for the flashlight stowed in the front most pocket of his backpack.

He flicks it on and shines it down the length of the pipe, and Eddie squints, trying to make out any solid surface the light lands on. It looks at first an awful lot like the darkness has swallowed the light completely, but then Bill angles the flashlight and the beam of light catches along the rough, textured inner wall, expanding down as far as Eddie can see.

“W-w-we should ch-check in h-here, too,” Bill says quietly.

“I don’t think I can stay out much longer,” Mike says apologetically on Eddie’s other side. He’s grimacing when they turn toward him. “My parents _really_ didn’t want me out on my own today, and they’re always weird about friends until they meet them - I’m really sorry, Bill, I can try to get back out tomorrow morning if you want to keep looking -”

“I have to go, soon, too,” Beverly murmurs as she glances down at her watch. “My dad’ll be home from the morning shift in a couple of hours. I might be able to come back after he leaves for his other job, though.”

A cloying sense of fear claws up the length of Eddie’s throat, festering intensely when Ben announces he needs to head home as well - something about the seven of them together felt impenetrable, but broken down into fractions like this feels like an invitation for vulnerability, a weakness in the walls. Eddie thinks of the bulbous white head and the sharp, sharp teeth and the sunken yellow eyes and shudders.

“We should all come back together,” Stan says resolutely, and Eddie very seriously considers kissing him out of thankfulness. “There’s less of a chance of something bad happening that way.”

“W-w-what are you t-t-tuh-halking about?” Bill asks incredulously. “W-what could p-p-p-puh-hossibly happen? We h-h-h-have Eddie. E-E-Eh-Eddie can p-protect us.”

“That’s not fair to Eddie, Bill,” Richie says quietly.

“What if something happens to Eddie?” Stan cries at the same time, loud enough that the question echoes back from within the pipe.

“Spaghetti Man should get to decide if he wants to or not,” Richie continues, patting Stan on the shoulder. “They’re _his_ powers, after all. Not ours.”

Bill glares at them both in turn, before looking at Eddie. He’s clearly waiting for an answer - everyone is - but Eddie still hesitates, torn between the bone-deep need to appease Bill and his own quivering instincts screaming to get his friends and himself as far away from this pipe as possible.

But Bill is looking at him like Eddie’s his last hope, and Eddie’s never been very good at denying Big Bill anything he asked for. “Okay,” Eddie whispers with a nod, trying very hard to swallow down the sudden surge of nausea that clenches in his belly. “I’ll - yes. Let’s look in there, too.”

Mike, Beverly, and Ben wish them luck and wave goodbye before trekking back down the river toward the clubhouse, and Stan stares after them until the last flashes of Beverly’s flowing skirt vanish amongst the trees. Bill ventures into the pipe several paces before pausing just beyond the edge of darkness, shining his flashlight down the length of the pipe and craning his neck. Eddie watches Stan stare after the others for a long moment before he feels Richie on his left.

“You don’t _have_ to do this if you don’t want to, Eds,” he says quietly.

Eddie glances at Bill’s back, before squinting up through bright sunlight at Richie’s face. “You think I’m doing this because I _want_ to?” he asks incredulously, and Richie snorts. “No, just the _thought_ of wading through greywater is fucking disgusting, dude. I’m _definitely_ not doing this because I want to. It’s just - it’s _Bill_.” He shrugs.

Richie nods slowly, blue eyes flicking over Eddie’s face. Something in his posture sets Eddie’s teeth on edge; he opens his mouth, and Eddie holds his breath. “What’s greywater?”

Eddie lets the breath out in one quick huff. “That,” he points to the stagnant river of cloudy, brownish water standing at the bottom of the pipe, rippling just slightly each time Bill shuffles another inch forward. “Basically just piss and shit and a bunch of other fucking nasty stuff. It’s like a staph infection waiting to happen.”

Richie steps into the pipe and grabs Bill’s discarded stick from earlier, flashing Eddie a mischievous grin as he pokes at a sodden plastic bag floating in the water at his feet. “Doesn’t smell like caca to _me_ , señor,” he says over his shoulder in a horrible approximation of a Spanish accent.

He hooks the bag over the end of the stick and lifts it out of the water, turning back toward Eddie with a broad, mischievous grin. “ _Don’t_ ,” Eddie says sharply, eyes never leaving the bag even as Richie begins to threateningly wave it back and forth. “I’m serious, Rich, _do not_ throw that at me -”

Richie tosses the bag toward Eddie’s feet and Eddie shrieks, leaping backwards just far enough to avoid the splash. “That’s disgusting, Richie,” Stan says calmly as he steps closer to Eddie.

“I’ll show _you_ disgusting -”

“G-guys.”

A lone shoe - stained a sickly piss-yellow - hangs from Bill’s crooked fingers. Bill shifts the angle of the flashlight, and the bold _B. RIPSOM_ written in black ink on the inside of the shoe is plainly visible from the mouth of the pipe.

“Oh, fuck,” Richie breathes. “Is that -?”

“Betty’s.”

“Oh, my god,” Stan chokes, and Eddie swallows hard, heart lodged in his throat. Richie trudges closer, head angled down to get a better look at the shoe, and Bill twists just enough to shine his flashlight further down the pipe into the darkness. “Oh, god, I don’t like this. I don’t like this at all.”

“ _You_ don’t like this?” Richie quips. “Imagine how _Betty_ feels runnin’ around down here with only one friggin’ shoe.”

It hits all the same rhythms as one of Richie’s typical jokes, but falls flat with the strained quality of his voice and the uneasy downward curve of his lips. Betty was in the same math class as both Richie and Eddie. He thinks maybe those were the shoes she wore to school the day before she disappeared.

“Now just what in the _hell_ d’you boys think yer doin’ down ‘ere?”

Mr. Nell comes tramping down the gentle incline to the right of the pipe, looking royally pissed off beneath the visor of his Derry Police Department-issued hat and not even remotely sympathetic for making Eddie jump and swing his arms like a tottering windmill to keep from falling backwards into the water. Stan lets out a strangled half-shout at the same time and clamps both hands over his mouth, eyes wide; Bill and Richie both freeze inside the pipe, little more than colorful blobs in Eddie’s periphery.

Eddie glances backwards at Stan, and Stan stares back, and an unspoken understanding passes between them like wind through the pines: _he can’t find out about the pipe_.

“N-nothing,” Eddie says, fumbling backwards as Mr. Nell makes it to the edge of the river and steps into the current. “Nothing, we were just - uh, playing.”

“By the sewers,” Mr. Nell says suspiciously, sloshing closer, stopping only just beyond Bill and Richie’s line of vision. He places both hands on his hips, fingers caught on his cracked leather belt, left thumb bent over the butt of his holstered gun. “Couldn’t think of a be’er place to play?”

Eddie feels his mouth drop open, but nothing comes out - it’s like his voice is caught somewhere in the cavity of his chest. “We were looking for something.” Stan manages after a moment.

“Lookin’ for sommat?” Mr. Nell repeats.

“Supplies,” Stan says, significantly weaker than before.

“Supplies for wha’, exactly?”

“Uh -”

“A dam.” The words bubble up from Eddie’s chest like the first trickles of a thawing brook; he inhales through his nose as Mr. Nell’s eyes flick over his face. “We were - I wanted to see if we could build a dam further upstream, so we came down this way looking for, for sod. And stuff.”

Mr. Nell eyes them suspiciously, and Eddie holds his breath. “ _Jay_ sus. What on Earth’re you boys buildin’ a dam fer?”

Eddie shrugs helplessly.

“Lookie here,” Mr. Nell says, stepping closer - Bill and Richie inch backwards inside the pipe, and Eddie shifts his own feet, hoping his splashing is loud enough to cover Bill’s and Richie’s. Mr. Nell doesn’t even glance at the pipe. “Don’ go buildin’ yer dam down that’a way - this here’s a gravity drain for greywater runoff comin’ outta pipes like that one,” he points at Bill and Richie without looking away from Eddie, and Eddie holds his breath until his meaty hand drops back to his hip. “You’ll go backin’ up toilets and washin’-machines and the like if ya did that, ya hear me?”

Eddie nods quickly. “Yes, sir,” he says, glancing down to Mr. Nell’s chest automatically when his shining police badge winks in the sunlight.

Mr. Nell holds his stern expression a moment longer, before his eyes soften a fraction. “It ain’t the safest o’times to be playin’ down here, boys,” he says.

“W-we like it down here,” says Stan, inching closer to Eddie - further from the pipe, Eddie realizes after a beat. “Down in the Barrens, I mean.”

Mr. Nell nods, gaze lifting over Eddie and Stan’s heads, scanning the trees on the far side of the river. “Aye,” he says after a long moment. “I reckon I liked it down here meself, when I was yer age. ‘Course,” he looks back down at them, stern once more, “kids weren’t goin’ missin’ back then at the rate they are now. You boys got any other friends you can bring along with ya the next time you wanna come down here?”

“Yes, sir,” Eddie says, “they were here earlier, they just went home for lunch a few minutes ago.”

Mr. Nell nods again, satisfied. “Good. You boys’ll do well ter stick together _with yer other friends_ until we get this whole thing sorted, understand?”

“Yes, sir,” says Stan solemnly.

“Now go on home fer lunch, I don’t wanna see either’a you boys down here again today.”

Eddie hesitates for another moment, before moving past Mr. Nell and up into the trees in the opposite direction from the clubhouse. He knows without looking that Stan is right behind him; they walk in complete silence for several minutes, ears straining.

The gleaming Derry Police cruiser is parked on the side of the road at the treeline, and Eddie hurries past it, motioning for Stan to follow him across the street. They crouch down behind the bushes pressed against the guardrail; Eddie does his best to mute the sounds of his own heavy breathing as he watches the trees.

Mr. Nell appears a couple of minutes later, whistling tunelessly and spinning the cruiser’s keys around his finger. He sits heavily enough to rock the whole cruiser and slams the door shut behind him; the engine turns over and, after a long moment of tuning the radio, Mr. Nell slowly pulls away.

They wait until he’s a little further down the road before straightening up, and are only halfway across the street again when Richie and Bill appear in flashes between tree trunks closer to the edge of the river. “A prince among men, that Mr. Nell!” Richie crows in a terrible imitation of Mr. Nell’s thick Irish accent, practically skipping out onto the road. “A foine, _foine_ man!”

“Shut _up_ , Richie,” Stan mutters. “He was right, y’know. It’s not safe for us to be down there by ourselves.”

“He only suh-suh-haid that ‘cause he th-thought it was j-juh-just you and Eh-Eddie down there,” Bill says with a frown. “B-b-buh-besides, Eddie’s got -”

“It’s not _about_ that, Bill,” Stan interrupts. “It’s just - look, I’m _sorry_ about Georgie, honestly, I am, but we’re just _kids_. What’re we gonna be able to do for Georgie that the cops can’t?”

“C-c-cuh- _care._ ” Bill spits.

“You heard Mr. Nell,” Stan counters, undeterred by Bill’s venomous glare. “ _He_ cares. And I’m not saying we shouldn’t look for Georgie, but we _should_ wait until we have _everyone_. It’s safer that way.”

Stan’s face is pale - like just the thought of going back is making him physically ill - but Bill looks to be coming around, if only slightly. “F-f-fuh-hine,” he says after a long pause. “We’ll c-come back with the uh-uh-uh-others tomorrow and w-wuh-we’ll look a-again.”

“Sure an’ begorrah, a _foine_ compromise,” Richie says loudly, slinging an arm around Stan and Bill’s necks. “We’ll come back with the whole lot of ‘em, back to the auld country, what a sight for sore eyes -”

“Beep-beep, Richie,” Stan interrupts, and Richie falls silent - but pulls both Bill and Stan closer, eyes squeezing shut briefly before letting them both go. Richie steps back and skirts around, leaving enough room for Bill and Stan to shake on it while flinging his left arm around Eddie’s neck in much the same way.

“Ugh,” Eddie rolls his eyes and bats Richie’s right hand away before he has a chance to pinch Eddie’s cheek. “ _Don’t_.”

“Aw, Eds,” he pouts, “you’re just too cute, what else am I supposed to do about it if _not_ pinch those adorable little cherub cheeks?”

“You fuck off, that’s what you do,” Eddie says cheerfully.

-

They split off for lunch with plans to meet at Richie’s at five to spend the night - mostly so Bill can ensure Stan follows through with his promise, Eddie suspects. Sonia is still in her bedroom when Eddie carefully pushes the front door open; he can hear her heavy footsteps creaking the floorboards over his head.

He eases the door shut and snatches the note he left earlier from the console table beside the telephone, shoving it into his pocket as Sonia’s bedroom door clicks open upstairs. “Eddie-bear!” she calls as Eddie hurries toward the kitchen.

“G’morning, mommy,” Eddie half-shouts back.

She putters into the kitchen behind him while he busies himself with making another sandwich, pausing only long enough for her to press a wet, smacking kiss to the top of his head. “Have you been outside already?” she asks, running chubby fingers through his sweat-damp hair.

“I-I - I went on a walk around the block,” Eddie lies.

“That’s not _safe,_ darling,” Sonia tuts, and he keeps his gaze trained on the sliced ham before him. “You _know_ what happened to that poor, neglected Denbrough boy - not to mention the damage your delicate skin got from all that sunlight, did you remember to put on sunscreen?”

“Yes, mommy,” Eddie lies again.

“You need to go shower all of those chemicals off of you, then,” she says after a mighty _harrumph_. “It’s not good for your skin to leave that sunblock on for too long, you know, my dear friend who lives out in California has a son who forgot to rinse off his sunscreen three years ago and he got _cancer_ because of it -”

The phone rings, cutting her off mid-spiral. “I’ll get it,” Eddie chokes around his mounting anxiety; he drops his sliced ham directly on the counter and darts out of the kitchen.

“Eh-Eddie,” Bill says a bit breathlessly after Eddie answers. “W-we’ve got a p-pruh-hoblem.”

Eddie glances automatically toward the kitchen; he can hear his mother rummaging through the fridge. “What’s going on?” he asks quietly.

“B-Buh-Bev just c-called, sh-she needs uh-uh-us. Says it’s an e-emergency.”

“Okay. Right now?”

“Y-yuh-yes. M-meet at B-Buh-Ben’s, he l-lives closest to h-h-her.”

“I’ll be there.”

Bill hangs up without saying goodbye, and Eddie sucks in one last breath before hanging up the phone. “Mommy?”

“Yes, darling?”

“That was Stan,” he says smoothly. “He invited me to his house for lunch.”

Sonia peers around the corner, beady eyes narrowed. “You eat lunch at home, Eddie-bear.”

“It’s just that Stan’s bar mitzvah is soon,” Eddie says, “and Stan gets to have special lunches with his friends to celebrate.”

“I don’t think I like the idea of you eating foreign foods.”

“The food isn’t special, it’s just the lunchtime itself that’s special. And Mrs. Uris knows what I’m allergic to, she’ll be extra careful and make sure I don’t eat anything bad.”

Sonia purses her lips, and Eddie holds his breath. “Alright,” she says reluctantly. “But you take your epipen with you, Eddie. If you even _breathe_ near a cashew, you could die. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, mommy,” Eddie nods along quickly, hurrying toward her and pressing up to his tip-toes to kiss her cheek. “Thank you, mommy.”

He’s about halfway to Ben’s house - racing down Witcham Street - when Stan comes pelting down Neibolt Street to Eddie’s right, eyes wide and wild. Eddie doesn’t think to swerve - doesn’t think he’ll _need_ to swerve, given the considerable amount of time in which Stan has to spot him - but when Stan narrowly misses clipping his back tire and instead slams into the curb, Eddie almost topples off his bike. “Jesus _Christ_ , Stan!” Eddie shouts, skidding his heels along the road as Stan flips over his handlebars and lands on his back in the dirt. “What the fuck!”

Stan has already scrambled back up to his feet before Eddie can so much as even _think_ to dismount his bike. “C’mon, _c’mon_ ,” Stan half-chokes, half-shouts as he yanks his bike up off the ground and throws his leg over the seat. “We need to _go_!”

He’s manic, that much is plainly obvious, but he’s standing on the pedals and pumping so furiously he’s already leaving Eddie in the dust, so Eddie has very little choice but to snap his gaping mouth closed and hurry to catch up.

Richie, Bill, Mike, and Ben are all waiting for them on the street in front of Ben’s house, straddling their bikes, expressions varying degrees of anxiety; Stan almost crashes again as he tries to skid to a stop, dodging Richie’s back tire at the last second. “Holy _shit,_ Staniel,” Richie gasps as Stan staggers to a stop over his bike. “What the fuck?”

“Stan!” Eddie shouts, pulling his own bike up on Stan’s other side, blocking Stan’s front tire with his own. “What the hell is going on?”

Stan’s gaze darts between them, chest heaving, not unlike a rabbit caught in a trap. “I -” he stops, jaw working silently, and then looks at Bill. “Bill said - emergency.”

Bill blinks at Stan, brow furrowed, lips parted. “Ayuh,” he finally grunts, gripping both handles on his bike. “W-wuh-we need to g-g-get to B-Bev’s place.”

Stan swallows thickly. “Did she say anything else on the phone?”

“To hurry,” says Ben with a grimace. “We really need to go, she needs us.”

Bill, Mike, and Ben lead the group, and Richie and Eddie flank Stan on either side behind them. Stan is glaring straight ahead at the back of Mike’s head as they ride, resolutely ignoring both Eddie and Richie glancing at him and the apprehensive glances they exchange across him.

Beverly is seated on the rickety fire escape on the side of her apartment building when they pull up, a lit cigarette hanging loosely from her fingers; she takes one last quick drag, stubs it out, and scrambles to her feet, pressing her shaking hands against the wrinkled skirt of her dress and hurrying down the stairs as they dismount their bikes. “Something happened,” she chokes.

“What’s wrong?” Ben demands.

“I - my dad’ll _kill me_ if he finds out I had boys in the apartment.”

Bill’s brow furrows, and then he twists around to Richie. “W-w-wuh-hait out h-here,” he says, easing Silver down to the sidewalk.

Richie’s face contorts with outrage. “And do _what_?”

“D-d-distract her d-duh-dad if he sh-shows up.”

Eddie flashes Richie an apologetic grimace, but lets his own bike fall to the ground as he hurries toward the fire escape with the others. “How am I supposed to do _that_?” Richie shouts after them.

“Do what you do best,” Stan calls over his shoulder - already sounding less manic than before. “Just _start talking_!”

Richie’s mumbled response is lost to the deafening clatter of six pairs of feet running up the fire escape; in the brief flashes of the street Eddie gets on his way up, he sees Richie slumped dejectedly back on his bike seat, staring over the canal across the street.

Beverly leads them through the front door silently, and Eddie has but a moment to steel himself before the overwhelming stench of stale beer and cigarettes hits him like a brick wall. The apartment itself looks pretty run-down - stained carpets, faded wallpaper, rickety, secondhand furniture shoved haphazardly along the walls, thick dust bunnies that stir with the pitiful whirring air conditioner puttering in the window beside the front door and their trodding feet. It all lends itself to a rather bleak atmosphere. “This way,” Beverly says from the hallway.

Eddie hurries toward her, masking his guilt by glancing at the others - they all look fairly guilty, too, like they were also caught having an uninvited peek.

The hallway is dark - by the looks of it, the lightbulb in the light fixture has burnt out - but bright sunlight spills in through the cracked door at the far end of the hall. A faint, pleasant perfume mixes with the air in that direction, growing stronger the closer they get, but Beverly veers off to the right before they get there.

She stops a foot short of the door at the end of this alcove, and Eddie peers over her shoulder. He can see sunlight coming in from under this door, glowing a bright and sinister red. “M-my dad couldn’t see it,” she whispers. “I’m - I’m afraid you won’t be able to see it, either.”

“Sh-show us, B-B-Bev,” Bill murmurs.

She inches forward and twists the knob, and Eddie inhales a lungful of smokey air and holds his breath as the door swings open.

Blood - thick and dark and oozing - covers every single inch of every surface Eddie can see. He lets all the air in his body out in one big _whoosh_ just as Stan, Mike, and Ben all gasp sharply behind him. “H-huh-holy shit,” Bill whispers.

“You see it?” Beverly asks.

“ _Blood_ ,” Eddie says, clipped.

Beverly steps toward the bathroom, and Eddie blinks - vision flickering like a faulty lightbulb - and suddenly _Beverly_ is covered in blood, too, drenched from head to toe, blue eyes flashing beneath a fringe of dripping curls matted to her forehead. He supposes the others can see it on her now, too, because Eddie’s cracked and strangled shout mixes in with Stan’s and Mike’s, and Ben nearly shoves them all into the walls as he automatically starts toward Beverly. “Are you _hurt_?” Ben gasps.

Beverly smiles ruefully and shakes her head, and a fraction of the tension radiating off of Ben leaks from his shoulders. “I just happened to be in there when it started,” she says, hooking a thumb over her shoulder toward the bathroom. “It all came up out of the sink and I was standing over it.”

There are bloody footprints on the carpet beneath their feet, too - a familiar bootprint he’s seen in the mud around the clubhouse from Beverly’s Docs, and an unfamiliar, significantly larger print that, Eddie supposes, probably belongs to her father. “Your dad walked in and didn’t see _anything_?” Eddie murmurs.

Beverly shakes her head. “He heard me screaming when it started and came in right after it ended, but he couldn’t - he couldn’t see _anything_. I - I told him I was screaming ‘cause I saw a spider in the sink.”

Despite the blood, Beverly visibly clenches her jaw, as if physically biting more words back. Ben seems to sense it, too - he rocks forward to the balls of his feet, hands fidgeting at his sides. “What can we do to help you, Bev?” he asks softly.

“W-we can’t l-luh-heave it like th-this,” Bill mutters at the same time.

Beverly’s eyes go wide and pleading, hands twisting before her as she inches cautiously toward Bill. “Will you help me clean it up?” she asks anxiously. “I have a bucket and some rags and stuff, I just - I don’t wanna do it alone. I _can’t_ do it alone.”

Between the six of them, they manage to get the bathroom in some semblance of a working order within an hour. Eddie insists on parsing out the yellow dishwashing gloves Ben pillaged from beneath the kitchen sink between himself, Stan, and Ben, all of whom work on wiping the blood from the walls, while Bill, Mike, and Beverly methodically mop the floor. Stan carries buckets of sudsy, bloody water out to the balcony just off the living room and dumps them over the railing while Eddie scrubs fruitlessly at the grout, heaving a sigh when the rag in his hands comes away a dusty rose color and the grout remains stubbornly reddish-brown. “It’s alright,” Beverly murmurs, one arm propped atop her mop, watching Eddie scrub. “It’s already so much better.”

“You should try washing all the rags before your dad gets home,” Eddie says, wringing the excess water out of his rag and watching it rush pink against the basin and swirl around the drain. “Even if he can’t see it, he might feel something, y’know? I can go get some bleach if you don’t have any, that’ll help with the stains.”

Beverly nods, glancing down at her feet. “Thanks, Eddie,” she breathes.

“D-d-d’you nuh-heed anything e-eh-else?” Bill asks, gingerly balancing his mop in the far corner of the bathroom.

Beverly hesitates, briefly chewing the inside of her cheek. “I - I need to shower,” she whispers, “but I _really_ don’t want to be alone.”

Nervously, Eddie glances at Stan, and finds that Stan’s wide-eyed expression perfectly mirrors his own sudden awkwardness. “Uh…” Mike trails between them.

“W-we can s-st-stuh-hand outside the d-d-door,” Bill offers, red-faced.

Beverly nods quickly, staring firmly down at the floor. The boys file out of the bathroom in silence, and Ben goes to close the door, but Beverly catches it before it can click fully shut. “Just - uh, just leave it cracked in case - in case something - um.”

“Okay,” Ben rasps. He pushes the door open half an inch, and Beverly pulls it open an inch further. They wait, collective breaths held, until they hear water groan through the pipes and rain down against the porcelain tub.

“Someone needs to go check on Richie,” Stan murmurs over the sounds of the shower curtain moving along the rail. “Make sure he’s - that he’s, uh, still down there.”

“You guys stay here,” Eddie says to Bill and Ben. “We’ll be just outside.”

They escape the thick tension coalescing in the corners of the alcove with Mike and rush outside, clattering down the fire escape like bats out of hell. Richie whips around at the noise, grimacing when Stan almost face-plants stumbling off the last step. “What was the emergency?” he asks once they’re close enough.

Stan, in direct sunlight, suddenly looks quite faint; Eddie watches him sink to the ground slowly, knees drawn up to his chest and arms wrapped around his legs before returning his attention to Richie. “Blood,” Eddie says, “everywhere. All over the place, like - like _literally_ everywhere in the bathroom.”

Richie blinks. “Huh?”

“She needed help cleaning it all up,” Mike says thickly between deep, even breaths, his own gaze far away as he looks out across the canal. “There was _so much_.”

“She said it came out of the sink,” Stan says hoarsely from the ground. “Like a geyser or something. Her whole bathroom was _drenched_ , and so was she.”

“Nuh-uh,” Richie says dazedly. “No she wasn’t, she - I saw her, there was no blood.”

“We couldn’t see it at first, but she showed us the bathroom and _then_ we could see it all over her, too,” Eddie explains. “We cleaned everything up and now she’s showering.”

Richie stares at each of them, and then up the fire escape, squinting through the sunlight. “Where are Bill and Ben?”

“She needed to shower but didn’t wanna be alone, so they’re still up there waiting for her outside the bathroom.”

“ _Fuck_ ,” Stan huffs, before pressing his laced fingers against his lips. Richie, Mike, and Eddie snap toward him; Eddie winces when Stan laces his fingers together and taps his knuckles against his mouth, lightly at first but picking up force. “ _Fuck!_ ”

“Hey,” Richie kneels down and catches Stan’s wrists, forcing them apart when Stan tries to wrench free. “Stanley, _quit it_.”

“Something _bad_ is happening!” Stan snaps, and Richie’s head jerks back. “Something _really bad_ is happening, can’t you feel it?”

“What are you talking about? Feel _what_?”

Stan just stares up at Richie, looking to be on the verge of tears in the midst of his silent plea. Richie glances up at Eddie and Mike - a bit desperate, as if begging them for help - and then refocuses on Stan. “Something _bad_ is happening,” Stan repeats in a halting whisper.

Eddie kneels down on Richie’s other side, steadying himself with a firm grip on Stan’s shoulder. “It’s gonna be okay, Stan,” he says earnestly, holding Stan’s gaze when it flicks to his face. “I’m not gonna let anything bad happen -”

“You can’t _promise_ that,” Stan interrupts, choked, “you can’t be everywhere at once, Eddie, you can’t - you can’t _guarantee_ that something won’t happen when you’re not around -”

“All the more reason to stick together like Mr. Nell said, right?” Eddie asks, and Richie nods vigorously, and Stan’s desperation begins to morph into something wearier before their eyes. “All that blood in the bathroom - that happened because Bev was by herself. We stick together, and nothing bad’s gonna happen. That’s how it’s always been.”

Stan lets out a shuddering sigh - still unconvinced, but maybe no longer willing to argue about it, judging from the tired set of his shoulders. “ _Jee_ -zus, Stanny,” Richie breathes, “you act like somethin’s comin’ after you _specifically_.”

Whatever reaction Richie’s expecting from Stan is most certainly not the one he gets - Stan merely stares at Richie, jaw set, and Richie’s half-formed grin falls away after just a couple of seconds. “Stan?” Eddie says slowly.

“I -” Stan stops, eyes going glassy and glazed. “I saw something earlier. On my way to Ben’s.” Eddie swallows around the lump that automatically lodges in his throat, and Stan sniffles - Eddie can’t remember when his nose started running. “I was coming up Neibolt Street,” Stan continues, voice markedly strained. “There’s this house - twenty-nine, I think, or maybe twenty-seven - I saw - there were - like, in the doorway -”

He stops and scrubs his hands over his face, and Eddie gently squeezes his shoulder in what he hopes is an encouraging movement. “What’d you see, Stan?”

“Boys. Two boys. The front door was open and - and they were just standing there. Only they - it’s like they - they were calling my name.”

Richie rocks forward; his brow is furrowed. “Did you know them?” Mike asks quietly over Eddie’s head.

“No,” Stan mutters. “I’ve never seen them before in my life. Not that - that I know of, at least, I - I don’t know.”

Richie glances at Eddie, and then back to Stan. “I think I’m missing something here, chief,” he says after a moment.

“They were - they were - _dead_.”

“Dead,” Richie repeats after a pause, and Stan nods jerkily. “How do you know they were dead?”

“They were - _god_ ,” Stan covers his eyes again, pressing down hard into his eye sockets with the heels of both hands. “They were drowned,” he says to his wrists. “Their skin - it was all pale and bloated and, and peeling away, like - like they had been in the water for a long, long time. And their eyes were - they didn’t have any eyes. They were fucking _dead_ , okay? They were dead, but they were standing just past the door, and they were _calling my name._ ”

“Did they say anything else to you?” Mike asks, oddly urgent.

“They wanted me to come inside and play with them,” Stan mumbles. “They wanted me to come inside and play in their - in their _pool._ They wanted me to teach them how to float.”

Mike crouches down beside Eddie, his gaze hard and determined and focused on Stan’s face. “What else? What else did you see?”

Slowly, Stan lowers both hands and squints at Mike. “There was someone else in the yard,” he says, “just past the sunflowers, close to the gate. It was - he looked like a clown.”

A shuddering breath spouts past Stan’s parted lips, and - as if the words bore a physical weight - Eddie tips backwards and lands on his butt in the dirt beside Stan. “What did he look like?” he asks, mouth dry.

Stan’s wide, owlish eyes land on Eddie’s face - a look of dawning comprehension, dawning _horror_ curdling in the faint creases on his face. “White face paint,” he whispers, “red lips, and - orange hair in tufts on the side and the top of his head.”

“And his head,” Mike presses hoarsely, “his head was kind of -”

He mimics the bulging shape Eddie had seen earlier, and Stan nods, tears now dripping freely down his face. “You’ve seen him, too?”

“I’ve seen the clown,” Mike confirms, “only not the drowned boys. I saw a - a bird.”

Stan’s brow twitches. “What kind of bird?”

“Big. Huge. As big as a firetruck. It chased me around the old Kitchener Ironworks facility a few weeks ago, and then turned into the clown right as I was getting away. And then I - I saw him again,” Mike shudders, and turns to Eddie. “That day in the trainyard when you saved me from Bowers. Before you got there, when Bowers was - at one point, I looked up, and I saw him there in the weeds across the river. He was just watching me, but he was covered in blood, and he was holding -” he stops and shudders again, dropping both hands to his knees, inhaling deeply through his nose - as if fighting the urge to vomit. “He was holding some kid’s arm,” he finally manages to whisper.

“ _Just_ the arm?”

“He was there the day we met?” Eddie asks, ignoring Richie. Mike nods. “Is that what we heard moving around the bushes right before Ben found us?”

“I don’t know. I think so.”

“I’ve seen him, too,” Eddie says, “I saw him earlier when we were out looking for Georgie. He - he talked to me.”

It feels quite good, getting it off his chest - he hadn’t even really allowed himself to think about it since it happened, and didn’t realize what a weight it was until it lifted from him. Mike and Stan both seem to believe him without question, but Richie -

“What the _fuck_ have you guys been smoking?” Richie asks, incredulous gaze bouncing between the three of them. “You guys tryin’ to say there’s some kind of killer clown on the loose in Derry or something?”

“Beep-beep, Richie,” Stan says through clenched teeth before Eddie can retort. “This is _serious_.”

“I’m serious, too!” Richie shouts indignantly. “I haven’t seen a clown like that _at all_ , so just what the hell are you guys talking about? Is it that only virgins can see it? Is that why I’m not seeing _any_ of this shit?”

“Oh, my _god_ ,” Stan mutters.

Arrhythmic footsteps pick up on the fire escape behind Stan; Bill, Ben, and Beverly descend slowly, Beverly combing through her still-dripping hair with her fingers. Eddie blinks; she’s sheared off at _least_ nine inches since he last saw her upstairs, and now her reddish curls shine bright and brilliant in the blazing afternoon sun cropped up close to her skull. “What’re you guys talking about?” she asks at the base of the fire escape.

“They’ve all lost their minds,” Richie calls as Eddie pushes up to his feet with his grip on Stan’s shoulder. “They think they saw a killer clown.”

Bill and Ben both freeze; Beverly side-steps around Bill, glancing back at them curiously. “C-c-cuh-clown?” Bill repeats through stiff lips.

“Don’t tell me _you’ve_ seen it, _too_ ,” Richie groans.

Mike staggers to his feet and Eddie hauls Stan up to his, and they all scramble closer. “I - I s-saw him,” Bill says, “in - in my b-b-buh-buh-hasement. Eh-earlier, b-before Bev c-c-called.”

“I’ve seen him, too,” Ben whispers, and the usual rosy glow ever-present in his rounded cheeks is gone, leaving him looking gaunt beyond his years. “Not long after the last day of school, actually. I - I thought maybe I dreamed it.”

“Did you see anything else?” Mike asks urgently. “Anything besides the clown?”

Both Ben and Bill nod.

“I saw a - a mummy,” Ben says with a shiver. “All dried out and rotted. And it was holding a balloon, only - it wasn’t a normal balloon. It was windy that day, I remember it being so windy they had to take the flag down at the library. But the balloon didn’t move with the wind, it - it’s like it was floating toward me, even though the wind was at my back.”

“That’s not possible,” Richie says flatly.

“I don’t know,” Ben mumbles, eyes downcast. “I just - that’s just what I saw. I don’t know.”

“I…” Bill stops and heaves a breath, jaw clenched for a split second. “I - I s-suh-haw Juh-Juh-Juh-Juh-” he stops again, briefly scrubs his fists over his eyes, and lets out a quiet, strangled growl. “I saw Juh-Georgie,” he manages.

“I didn’t see a clown,” Beverly whispers, “but I heard - I heard voices in the drain before the blood started. It sounded like - oh, _god,_ it sounded like Betty Ripsom.”

“What did she say?”

“I don’t really remember, to be honest, a lot - a _lot_ happened really quickly, and I was _so_ scared, but she knew I was there. She was saying my name. And there were other voices, too, and they all sounded like kids, except - except for one.”

“The mummy knew my name, too,” says Ben.

“The drowned boys knew mine,” says Stan.

“The bird couldn’t speak, but the clown knew mine,” says Mike.

“He knew mine, too,” says Eddie.

“M-m-me too,” says Bill.

“I think I’ve seen him other places, too,” Mike says after a long pause. “My dad - he’s got these pictures, see, he collects them. He likes history, and he likes talking with me about history, and he’s always been very interested in Derry. He grew up here, too, y’know. And I think - I would need to check to know for sure. If I’m right, I can show you.”

“W-wuh-we need to s-s-stuh-stay t-together,” Bill says resolutely.

Eddie reaches for Stan’s wrist and gently squeezes.

“We can all go back to the farm,” Mike says, “and you guys can spend the night, too. Um, Bev -”

“My dad won’t be back home until later tonight,” she says dismissively. “As long as I’m home by nine, I’ll have time to make it look like I never left.”

-

The Hanlon’s farm is situated just beyond the outskirts of town - still technically part of Derry township, but far enough away that all of the Losers except Mike and Eddie are red-faced and sweaty by the time Mike veers off the dirt road and onto a gravel driveway. Eddie squints at the two mailboxes situated on the corners of the Hanlon’s farm and the neighboring property - and swallows hard against bile rising up in his throat at the name haphazardly painted on the side of the other mailbox.

“You didn’t mention Bowers is your neighbor,” Eddie mutters as they coast down the driveway side-by-side.

Mike shrugs, chewing the inside of his cheek thoughtfully, eyes fixated on a small makeshift red shed rising up on the horizon. “I _did_ say he’s done worse than what he did in the trainyard,” he says after a moment. “I think he killed my dog a few years back.”

“ _What_?”

He shrugs again, entirely too nonchalant. “I couldn’t prove it, but I have a feeling. He was always at the fence line with Mr. Chips, and he always looked spooked when he heard my dad calling the dog away. And then one day Mr. Chips got _really_ sick, and the vet said it looked like he’d probably gotten into rat poison in one of our barns.” Mike shoots Eddie a twisted, humorless smile. “We don’t use rat poison.”

“Holy _shit_ , Mike!”

“It’s alright,” Mike says in a voice that suggests it’s most certainly _not_ alright. “What goes around comes around, that’s what my mom always says. I’ve gotta believe that’s true, because otherwise…” he trails, gaze suddenly glassy and distant, and then shudders.

“How much _further_ , Homeschool?” Richie asks in a distant pant behind them.

“Just over that last hill there,” Mike calls over his shoulder, pointing toward the gentle upward swell beyond a quaint farmhouse set just toward the end of the sloping gravel drive. “My dad stores his whole collection of photo albums in the garage behind the house.”

The driveway curves around the farmhouse in a graceful arch, looping almost all the way around to cut a path between the back of the farmhouse and a large, two-car garage. It looks sturdy enough, even with the chipped white paint around the side door and the pockets of rust gathered at the corners of the rolling garage door; it boasts an air of repeated, loving use, and Eddie feels a wave of comfort settle over his shoulders as he slows to a stop beside it.

“Michael!” a woman’s voice rings out from the farmhouse’s back door; when Eddie whips around, he spots a tall, slender, beautiful woman on the back porch, squinting in their direction while shielding her eyes from the sun.

“I’ll be right back,” Mike says softly to Eddie, and Eddie watches him hurry across the driveway as the rest of their friends come chugging down the drive. Ben is the last to catch up, offering little more than a sweaty, red-faced grimace by way of apology before toppling off his bike and landing on his back in the grass. He waves Stan’s attempted assistance off, staring up at the sky and panting heavily.

Mike and the woman are still talking - occasionally casting glances in their direction - but after a moment, the woman nods her head and flashes the group a bright smile. “Y’all get comfortable,” she calls to them as Mike dashes off the back porch. “I’ll bring some lemonade out in a minute.”

“You didn’t tell us you had a sister, Homeschool!” says Richie once Mike is back within earshot. “She’s _hot!_ ”

Mike pauses, expression somewhere between amused and stony. “That’s my _mom_ , Richie.”

Richie blinks, but appears otherwise undeterred. “Fuck, dude, first _Eddie’s_ babe of a mom, now _yours_ -”

“You are _not_ funny, Richard!”

“I’m _just saying_ -”

“Beep beep, Richie,” Stan sighs, and Richie grins smugly but falls silent.

The side door to the garage opens to near pitch blackness - very little sunlight permeates the fogged windows along the far walls. Mike steps inside first, reaching up and to the left with sure, practiced movements, and Eddie pauses on the threshold until he hears a heavy mechanical _click_ from somewhere deeper inside.

Artificial light floods the garage at once, illuminating metallic shelves lining the wall opposite the side entrance, and Eddie gasps. Boxes upon boxes sit in neat rows along each shelf - some of which bow downward slightly beneath particularly hefty weights. Each box is carefully labelled with masking tape and some thick-tipped permanent marker; Eddie squints through the thin clouds of dust motes swirling through the air and steps closer, trying to read the unfamiliar messy scrawl.

“My dad labeled them and my mom says we’ve got chickens with better handwriting,” Mike calls from Eddie’s left. He’s standing over an old workbench tucked in the corner of the garage, watching Eddie and the others slowly trickle inside with an amused smile while gathering loose documents spread across the table. He doesn’t look down at them as he works; just slides them all together in a somewhat organized stack and slides them into an open, empty manilla folder. “I’ve gotten good at reading his writing, so we’ll be alright,” Mike says as he tucks the folder between two others in a bursting cardboard box at his feet.

“Holy _shit_ , Homeschool,” Richie marvels softly as he approaches the nearest shelf. “It’s like a goddamn museum in here.”

“My parents have talked about opening up a business where they give historical tours of Derry to tourists,” says Mike. “I think it’s their retirement plan.”

“I hope for their sake tourists actually start coming here,” Stan mutters, head tilted to the right to read a slightly crooked label.

“Y-yuh-hoo said you m-muh-hight have s-s-seen that - that c-cluh-clown s-somewhere in th-these before?” Bill asks.

Mike’s expression sobers a degree as he nods. “It’s probably going to take me a second,” he says solemnly, studying the shelves closely. “There are a few that I can remember, and they’re in different boxes.”

“Is there anything we can do to help you look?” Ben asks.

Mike hesitates, lips pursed. “Yeah, actually. We need to find - uh, let’s see. That box up top by the door - the one in the corner -” Stan points, and Mike nods - “should have some information about when Derry was first settled back in seventeen forty-one. Grab that one. And - eighteen seventy-nine, there should be something about a group of lumberjacks and something else about a massacre at a bar in that box in the middle on the second shelf down.” Bill hefts the box in question off the shelf. “Nineteen-oh-six, that should be in this box here -” he points to the box closest to Beverly - “look for information on the explosion at Kitchener Ironworks, Easter Sunday. Richie, there’s a box on the fourth shelf right there in the middle that should have something on the Derry Padrinos, sometime in the late nineteen-fifties, I think. And Ben - grab that box on the bottom shelf on the left, look for the newspaper article written about the Bradley Gang slaughter. And -” Mike steps closer to the shelves furthest from the garage door, pulling a well-worn box from the middle shelf and carefully placing it on the floor between him and Eddie. “I’ll look for the Black Spot.”

“What should I do?” Eddie asks.

Mike nods toward the workbench - toward the cluster of large, rolled posters leaned against the far corner on top of the worktop. “One of those is a map of Derry,” he says. “D’you mind sifting through them and finding it? We should get a visual.”

The set about their tasks in relative silence, broken only by the occasional sneeze or cleared throat. Eddie manages to find the map on his third try; after carefully tacking it to the wall using push pins on the worktop, he settles cross-legged on the ground between Bill and Richie and carefully extracts a file from the box at Bill’s feet.

“L-like a b-b-buh-hook,” Bill says, gesturing to the file spread across his lap and the careful, orderly way he shifts articles from one side of the file to the other. Eddie tilts his file open the same way and smiles when Bill nods in approval.

Mrs. Hanlon ventures into the garage with a small wooden tray loaded with seven glasses of iced lemonade, her expression equal parts tentatively confused and undeniably happy. Mike smiles softly when she balances the tray on the corner of the worktop, and Eddie watches Mrs. Hanlon gently run her hand affectionately over the top of Mike’s head. Mike closes his eyes and leans just slightly into her touch, and something deep in Eddie’s chest clenches.

“Make sure you keep all this organized, Michael,” Mrs. Hanlon says sternly, gaze sweeping over the garage. “Dad’ll have your hide if he has to spend tomorrow going through all of these again.”

Eddie swallows hard, but Mike just snorts, and Mrs. Hanlon smiles, and only then does it occur to him that her threat wasn’t _really_ a threat at all. “We’re being careful, mom,” Mike says. “I’ll make sure it all gets put back before dad gets home.”

Mrs. Hanlon gently pats Mike’s cheek before turning back to the rest of them. “You kids are welcome to spend the night here, but make sure your parents know where you are, you hear?”

“Sh-sh-sure thing, M-Mrs. Hanlon,” Bill says. “Thanks.”

Mrs. Hanlon flashes them all one last dazzling, pearly-toothed smile before stepping backwards through the side door and pushing the door closed. “You guys can help yourselves,” Mike says a bit absently, jerking his head up toward the tray of lemonades without looking away from his file.

Bill doesn’t move, so Eddie doesn’t move, but Ben, Stan, and Richie all stand and carefully pick their way across the garage to the tray. Stan grabs a glass and has it half-drained before he even returns to his box; Eddie watches through his lashes as Stan presses the side of the glass against his sweat-damp forehead and sighs, eyes fluttering closed.

Both Ben and Richie have each taken two glasses. Ben makes his way back across the garage with his gaze intently focused on Beverly, and Eddie is so absorbed in watching him deftly maneuver through the maze they’ve unintentionally made that he does not notice Richie standing beside him until his vision is suddenly obscured by the bottom half of a glass of lemonade. “You looked thirsty,” Richie says when Eddie turns a questioning gaze up toward him.

“Thanks, Rich,” Eddie says, smiling at the cold condensation slicking his fingers as he takes the glass from Richie’s hand.

It’s quiet for a long while after that, aside from the rhythmic rustling of paper shifting and the muted clink of melting ice tapping against glass. Eddie’s idly teething on a rapidly shrinking ice cube when Bill suddenly jerks beside him.

“H-here,” Bill says, dropping the thin folder in his hand open on top of the box and pulling a worn photocopy of an old newspaper clipping from the contents. “R-r-right here, n-nuh-hine lumberj-jacks found - _ugh_ \- hacked to p-p-puh-pieces in a c-camp on the uh-upper K-K-K-Kenduskeag.”

Eddie quickly swallows the ice cube and forces himself not to wince at the corresponding dull, painful throb in his throat. “‘Massacre at the Silver Dollar,’” he reads out loud, the title of the article burning against his retinas. “Is this - oh, _god_ , is this what you were talking about, Mike? There are _pictures_.”

A disgusted murmur ripples through the group as Mike grimaces and nods. “We need the pictures,” he says, glancing back down at the papers he’s rifling through. “The pictures are the most important part.”

“Damn,” says Richie, “I always forget about the flood that happened here in the fifties.”

“Almost wiped out half the town,” Mike says without looking up. “They had to put up sandbags along main street to save the buildings from flooding. It wiped out a whole block of houses on the other side of the trainyard.”

Richie lets out a low whistle as he continues shuffling papers and Beverly lets out a distressed whine, dropping her open folder on top of her box and shivering. “Mine has pictures, too,” she mumbles as Ben lays a concerned hand on her shoulder. “So many kids died, holy shit.”

“Mine only has drawings,” murmurs Stan, a page clutched in either hand. He looks closely between the two, eyes narrowed in scrutiny.

“Real pictures didn’t start showing up in newspaper articles until the late eighteen hundreds,” Mike says, craning his head half-heartedly to peer at Stan. “The drawings are important too, though, pull all the drawings you can find.”

“Oh, wow,” Ben breathes, eyes trained on his folder spread open across his crossed legs. “These are _so_ graphic, wow.”

“Yeah, the Bradley Gang was pretty gruesome, too,” Mike says distractedly. “Make sure you get the picture taken from the third story over the pawn shop, would you? That’s the most important part. They’re all important, but that’s - that’s the one I remember.”

His voice goes soft at the end, his eyes a bit unfocused; he pulls three papers from his folder and sets the folder aside, scanning the top sheet carefully.

A good fraction of the color in Richie’s face has drained since the last time Eddie looked at him; he leans forward and hands Mike his article without a word, and the others quickly do the same. Eddie nudges Richie with his elbow as they rock back to their haunches, and Richie flashes him a tight smile that does not touch his eyes.

“Are you okay?” Eddie whispers as Mike spreads the articles across the workbench and leans over them.

Richie shrugs with one shoulder, eyes trained on Mike. “Those pictures were fucked up, is all,” he mutters.

“Here,” Mike calls before Eddie can formulate a response. He pulls a paper off the workbench and hands it to Bill; he points to the left side of the paper and Bill’s eyes widen as his body shudders with a gasp. “Is that who you saw in your basement?”

“Y-yes,” Bill whispers.

The photo is overwhelming when Bill passes it to Eddie; his eyes are automatically drawn to the vintage vehicles parked haphazardly in the middle of the road and riddled with bullet holes, the carnage within spilling out on the street on either side. He can see a limp body half-hanging out of the open back door of the car closer to the camera and the small, dark pools of liquid on the ground beneath either car - he can’t tell if it’s blood or oil or both. He grimaces, noting the shattered windows on the storefronts across the street from where the photo was taken, automatically trying to picture where on Main Street this would be today, but then Bill’s leaning over and pointing at a figure half-hidden in an alleyway beyond the first car.

Every molecule of oxygen in Eddie’s lungs evaporates immediately.

The clown doesn’t look _exactly_ the way Eddie remembers, but there is no doubt in his mind that it’s the same person. The bulbous head and haunting eyes are unmistakable; the wide, Cheshire grin all the more unsettling at a grainy distance. “That’s who I saw in the Barrens this morning,” Eddie whispers, passing the article to Richie and pointing the clown out.

Richie blinks at it a couple of times, and then passes it to Ben, who spots the clown without Richie’s help and shudders just as dramatically as Bill and Eddie. Mike is already sorting through the other articles now, his movements growing more and more frenzied until he lets out a triumphant shout and hands Bill another article. “Right there, right next to those two women -”

“I s-s-see him,” Bill interrupts, studying it a moment before passing it to Eddie - and sure enough, there it is, that same clown with that same terrible grin. Mike passes the next article to Bill without comment, who only glances for a moment before handing it to Eddie - and there he is again, peering through the window outside the Silver Dollar as two men in uniform carry a body covered in a white sheet through the front door.

“How is this possible?” Beverly asks a bit shrilly, looking between the first two articles. “These took place fifty years apart, but this guy looks exactly the same in both pictures -”

“That’s not the biggest gap,” Mike interrupts grimly, flourishing yet another article. “He’s here, too, in this article about the Derry Padrinos - this was from the fifties.”

“That’s almost a _hundred years_ ,” Stan says, taking the article Beverly passes to him without looking down. “You’re saying this - this _thing_ has been around for a hundred years?”

“Longer than that, if I’m being honest,” Mike says with a nod. “Seems like every twenty to thirty years, something really horrible happens here, and this guy always seems to be in the background.”

“That’s not the only weird thing about Derry,” Ben says hesitantly. “I did some research when we moved here - Derry has, like, a _crazy_ high child kidnapping and death rate. It’s like five or six times the national average, I think.”

“No way,” Richie says, voice cracking. “There’s no way, that’s - that can’t even be possible, you’re just saying that ‘cause kids are going missing now -”

“I read that before Betty went missing,” Ben murmurs apologetically.

“Are you guys honestly trying to tell me that this hundred-year-old clown-faced _fuck_ is the one who’s been taking all the kids that have gone missing in Derry for the last however many years? _Seriously_? Don’t you think someone would have noticed something like that by now?”

An uneasy silence descends across the group; Bill shifts, frowning thoughtfully. “N-not if - not if he - _i-it_ \- d-didn’t w-w-wuh-hant anyone to n-n-notice.”

Richie furrows his brow, incredulous. “What does that even _mean_?”

“W-w-whatever this th- _thing_ is, it’s o-o-o-obviously n-not totally h-h- _human_ . It - it sh-showed me Juh-Juh-Georgie, b-but not the r-ruh- _real_ Juh-Georgie. And it sh-showed everyone eh-else in h-here something d-d-different - s-something they were s-s-scared of. If it can d-d-do th-that, it can p-p-puh-probably m-manipulate other p-p-people, too, and m-make it so that n-n-nuh-no one eh-else n-n-n-notices it.”

“So what’s so special about _us_ that we’re the first to notice it, huh? Why us?”

“Maybe we’re _not_ the first ones to notice it,” Stan says quietly, eyes glued to the article clutched between his hands. “Maybe - maybe Betty and Eddie C. saw it, too. They just couldn’t get away from it like the rest of us did.”

Eddie swallows, trying to put words to the odd feeling percolating in his chest. “I didn’t see him as anything else,” he rasps, staring down resolutely at his crossed ankles to avoid Bill’s hard gaze. “I just saw him as the clown in the Barrens, I didn’t see - he didn’t look like anything else but the clown to me.”

It’s quiet for a long moment. “Th-th-that’s why,” Bill says softly. “That’s wuh-why we’re d-d-d-different - it m-m-must _know_ , s-s-suh-homehow.”

“Are you trying to say this is somehow _Eddie’s_ fault?” Richie snaps, eyes flashing beneath his glasses.

“N- _no_ ,” Bill snaps back, “I’m s-s-saying m-m-mm-maybe Eh-Eddie’s the r-r-reason w-we’re s-s- _safe_ . M-maybe it’s s-s-sc- _scared_ of h-huh-him.”

The echoes of its snarls ring through his mind, the image of its narrowed eyes flash behind his eyelids. “I don’t know,” Eddie says quietly. “He didn’t try to scare me the way he tried to scare everyone else, but he didn’t seem scared of me at first - when I threatened him -” he flicks a miniature flame to life at the end of his index finger “- he backed off and acted scared, but only _after_ I threatened him.”

“Is that what you were looking at when I came and got you?” Beverly asks.

Eddie flushes. “Ayuh. Sorry, I just - I didn’t know how to say it without sounding crazy.”

“I know what you mean,” she says with a gentle smile. “I thought for sure you guys were gonna send me to Juniper Hill if you didn’t see all the blood in the bathroom.”

“So - okay, just so I got this straight,” Richie says as Eddie flashes Beverly a grin, “we’re dealing with a hundred-year-old clown thing that can apparently, what, _shape-shift_ into different monsters whenever it wants to who _also_ kidnaps kids?”

“A hundred- _plus_ -year-old clown thing,” Stan corrects absently.

“There are stories of other things happening before Derry Township was officially settled, but none of it is on record,” Mike says, gaze drifting to the worn leather albums carefully lined along a shelving unit to the right of the side entrance. “It’s all word-of-mouth - stories passed down through the generations in the Shokopiwah tribe. This whole twenty- to thirty-year cycle goes back hundreds, if not _thousands_ of years.”

“And it’s all because of this clown?”

Mike grimaces and shrugs.

Richie stares, open mouthed. “That’s _literally_ not possible.”

“W-w-w-wuh-he don’t nuh-know that,” says Bill.

“So what are you proposing, then? We go find this thing and ask it if it knows what happened to Betty and Eddie C.? Or if _it’s_ the thing that took them to begin with?”

“Y-y-yes.”

Richie’s jaw drops again and Stan’s head whips up, but otherwise the room goes perfectly still. “You’re joking,” Richie chokes after a moment.

“I’m n-n-not.”

“I thought we were supposed to be looking for _Georgie_.” Stan says, voice strained.

Bill clenches his jaw. “D-d-d-duh-d’you r-really think th-this th-th- _thing_ isn’t i-i-involved in w-wuh-whatever h-happened to G-G-Juh-Juh-Georgie?”

“We don’t know anything _about_ this thing, Bill,” Mike says gently. “We don’t know what it is or what it wants - it could hurt us, Bill, it’s already _tried_ to hurt us -”

“N-not E-E-Eh-Eddie.”

It’s a monumental effort, but Eddie holds Bill’s gaze even with the anxiety thrumming in the cavity of his chest.

“No!” Richie says sharply as he rocks forward in Eddie’s peripheral. “You can’t just - that’s not _fair_ , Bill! We don’t _know_ that it can’t hurt Eddie -”

“E-Eddie can h-h-heal himself _and u-u-us_ , E-Eh-Eddie’s the oh-only one it h-h-huh-hasn’t tried to s-s-scare b-because i- _it’s_ scared of h-h- _him_ \- Eh-Eddie can g-g-g-get me to it -”

“ _That doesn’t mean_ -”

“ _Guys_!” Eddie roars. Both Bill and Richie fall silent, though neither of their steady, fuming glares flicker from the other’s face. “Jesus _Christ_ , _calm down_. Can we talk about this for five seconds without screaming at each other? _Please_?” They continue glaring for another long, tense moment, before Richie finally looks away. “ _God,_ okay. Thank you, Richie, I - appreciate what you’re trying to do, but it’s okay. I wanna help, if I can. If he actually _is_ scared of me for whatever reason, I - I think it would be stupid of us _not_ to use that to our advantage. We _should_ use it to our advantage.”

“How?” Richie mutters, glaring pointedly at his knees. Stan nods along insistently. “If it’s so scared of you, how are you s’posed to get close enough to it for Bill to interrogate it?”

“We all saw it in different places,” says Stan, still nodding. “It’s popped up all over town - how are we supposed to corner it?”

“I-it has to l-l-li-live s-somewhere,” Bill says, glancing at Beverly when she points at him in vehement agreement. “It c-c-cuh-han’t just d-d-disappear - it h-has to g-g-guh- _go_ s-somewhere. It l- _lives_ somewhere in D-D-Duh-Derry - we j-j-just have to f-f-find it.”

“That’s what I want to use the map for,” Mike says carefully. “We can mark each place where we saw it and where a historical event happened, and see if we can find any patterns. Maybe we can figure out where it lives from there.”

Bill and Richie are still clearly agitated, but they do not so much as glance at each other as they all cluster around the map. Mike carefully marks each place with the blunt end of a large red marker, the tip of his tongue caught between his teeth. Ben rifles through the articles and reads out each location, and then one-by-one they each point to their respective locations on the map - Eddie’s ends up being a rather loose circle in the general area, but no one seems particularly bothered by it. Richie stands to Eddie’s left, jaw and fists clenched, blue eyes scanning the map with such dizzying speed that Eddie can’t tell if he’s actually absorbing any of it at all.

Mike steps back and recaps the marker, sliding into place between Eddie and Stan. Eddie lets his own gaze wander, trying to detect a natural pattern, but finds himself huffing quietly through his nose.

“It looks like an absolute clusterfuck,” Richie says flatly.

He isn’t wrong. Some red dots are close, almost right on top of each other, but others are spread and lonely in the furthest corners of the map. There is no one common street, no common area - nothing that would point to location being a factor in _whatever_ the fuck has been happening in Derry.

Bill steps forward, brow furrowed, jaw working as if he’s busily chewing the inside of his cheek. “Th-this looks f-f-fuh-familiar,” he says after a moment.

“Bullshit.”

Bill flashes Richie a glare, but quickly returns his focus to the map. “M-Mike, would your d-d-dad h-have a m-m-muh-hap of the s-s-sewers?”

Mike blinks, but glances at the cluster of rolled papers Eddie sifted through earlier. “Actually -” Mike starts, before darting toward the papers and quickly shuffling through them. “Holy shit,” he murmurs as he pulls a slightly smaller roll from the corner.

Bill helps Mike unravel the map and tack it up on top of the first map; the map of the sewers must be printed on thinner paper, for Eddie can clearly see the red dots through the top page. It isn’t an exact one-to-one ratio, but -

“Oh, my god,” Beverly whispers.

The dots each fall along a sewer line - even Eddie’s vague, encompassing circle. “The sewers,” Stan breathes, voice barely cresting a whisper.

“Th-th-that m-must be h-how it gets uh-uh-around,” Bill says. “Juh-Juh-Juh-Georgie - Juh-Georgie was l-luh-hast seen by a s-s-storm drain, and th-those connect to the s-sewers.”

“D’you think it _lives_ in the sewers?” Ben asks, apprehensive gaze flicking from the map to Bill’s face. “Didn’t Stan say it’s like a labyrinth down there? How’re we supposed to find it?”

“Shouldn’t we figure out what it _is_ before we start talking about how to find it?” Stan asks, more shrill than normal, and that unidentified feeling is back in full force in Eddie’s chest. “It’s clearly _not_ human -”

“The clown is the common denominator,” Eddie says. “Clowns are humans.”

“How many humans do _you_ know who can shape-shift, Eddie?”

“How many humans do you know who can heal themselves and fly and make fire with their hands, _Stanley_?”

“Hold on,” Richie interjects as Stan balks. “Are you saying you think this thing is - is _like_ _you_?”

“Maybe!” Eddie half-shouts, face flushing with defensive embarrassment. That feeling is back in his chest, growling indignantly. “Maybe we should try to find him and, and try to _talk_ to him!”

Loud protests come from all sides, garbling together in his ears. Eddie clenches his jaw and tries not to twitch when he feels Richie grab his wrist. “Eh- _Eddie_ ,” Bill shouts over the noise, “that th-th- _thing_ isn’t like y-y-you. You’re g-guh-good, and i-it’s - it’s n- _not._ You could f-f-f-feel it, too, r-r-ruh-hight?”

Eddie swallows hard, trying to focus on Richie’s firm grip and not on the chills racing down his spine at the involuntary memory of yellow eyes flickering in the shadows. “I felt - I don’t know _what_ I felt,” Eddie grumbles. “ _Something_ weird, but that doesn’t mean he’s not good. And I don’t - maybe he’s confused. Maybe he doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

“How would that be possible?” asks Stan faintly.

Eddie glances at Mike; Mike is watching him closely, a distant, thoughtful look in his eye. “Your eyes, that day,” Mike says slowly, and Eddie swallows. “Your eyes were - glowing. _Gold_. I haven’t seen you do that since.”

The silence is thick, the tension palpable. Carefully, Eddie pulls his arm from Richie’s grasp. “I - I remember,” he says, “but it’s like - the whole thing felt like I was watching a movie. Like someone - something else was pulling the strings and I -” he stops and heaves a quick, steadying breath. “If it happened to me, it could also have happened to him.”

Mike frowns, eyes flashing with pity. “You didn’t hurt anyone that day, Eddie,” he says softly.

“I hurt _Bowers_.”

“You only threatened to hurt him, and he was _asking_ for it.”

Eddie swallows thickly, ignoring the sharp, creeping knot of tears welling up behind his eyes. “We don’t even know if the clown is the one hurting people,” he says, “maybe he doesn’t actually have anything to do with it, maybe he’s just been in the wrong place at the wrong time - or maybe he was there trying to stop things, maybe things would have been worse if he _hadn’t_ been there -”

“L-look at his f-f- _fuh_ - _hace_ , Eddie,” Bill says, grabbing the article at the top of the pile on the worktop and shoving it in Eddie’s face. His eyes fall automatically to the clown and his unsettling grin. “Th-th-that doesn’t l-look like s-s-suh-homeone trying to h-h-help.”

“So maybe he can’t help it, maybe he’s just - trapped, stuck in whatever - whatever it was that happened to me that day by the trainyard.”

“For a hundred years?” Ben asks gently. “Without aging at all?”

“You were only like that for a few seconds, Eddie,” Mike reminds him.

Eddie shakes his head, gaze dropping to the floor between them. “Even if it was just for a _second_ , even if I didn’t technically do anything _wrong_ , the fact remains that it _happened._ If I’m good, and it happened to me, then logically that guy could be good, too. Whoever he is. If we can find him and - snap him out of it, or whatever, maybe - maybe he can tell us where Georgie and Betty and _all_ the missing kids are. Maybe he can help us _find them_. And maybe - maybe he’ll know -” he stops and clenches his jaw, ignoring the weight of six gazes drilling holes through his head. “Maybe he’ll know what happened to me that day in the Standpipe.”

Beverly murmurs quietly, and Richie gently squeezes his shoulder. “ _Eds_ ,” he whispers.

“I just think it would be worth it to figure out who he is. If we can find his name, maybe we can get through to him.”

Silence follows Eddie’s plea; he’s just about to break and speak again when Richie loudly claps his hand against Eddie’s shoulder. “Alright, then, mates,” he says loudly in his Posh British Voice. “We’ve got our marchin’ orders from Master Kaspbrak. Find this bloke’s name so we can _find this bloke_!”

“Fucking _terrible_ voice,” Eddie mutters through his poorly-suppressed grin.

Richie smiles, crooked teeth barely peeking out between his lips. “Wotcher, Eds,” he says, snaking his arm around Eddie’s neck and pinching his cheek on the other side.

-

The next several days unfold mostly within the walls of the Derry Public Library. The librarian - a kindly older woman named Mrs. Starrett who already seems to know both Ben and Mike by name - leads them to the four microfiche readers tucked away in the reading room in the back corner of the adult side of the library. Bill, Mike, Stan, and Beverly settle in, leaving Eddie, Richie, and Ben to scour the newspaper archives by hand.

They lay claim to the table closest to the viewfinder cache, still separated from the others by four shelves and therefore out of a direct line of vision. Eddie shifts in his seat uncomfortably at the separation for most of that first day, egged on by Ben’s own restless fidgeting, but manages to make it through without leaping out of his seat to check on the others every five minutes thanks in large part to the broad, goofy grins Richie sends his way every time he catches his gaze.

The first breakthrough comes on the fourth day, in the form of a black-and-white photograph barely in focus under the lens of Eddie’s viewfinder. He almost misses it - eyelids drooping and vision slipping from the strain of staring at things in close range for so many hours in a row - but he manages to catch it just before muscle memory has his hands shifting the image away.

“Oh my god,” he murmurs, twisting the knob to zoom in. The image slides into focus; three men in full clown costumes smile broadly for the camera, their makeup garish and heavy even without color. They’re all objectively terrifying, but the one on the left - the one on the _left_ \- “I think I found him.”

“Are you serious?” Stan asks to Eddie’s right. Eddie nods, unable to tear his face away from the lens. “Are you _sure_?”

“I don’t know,” Eddie mutters. “It _looks_ like him -”

“What’s the caption say?” Beverly asks breathlessly on the other side of the desk.

Eddie adjusts the field of vision and squints. “‘ _Clowns pose on grounds of McPheerson’s Traveling Circus. From left to right, Bob Grey as Pennywise the Dancing Clown, John Levy as Bouncing Bingo Bango, and Darwin Keith as KoKo._ ’”

“Which one is he?” Mike asks, voice hushed.

Eddie shifts the view again, zooming in on Bob’s face. “Bob Grey. Pennywise.”

He moves away from the viewfinder and Stan immediately dives into his place, gasping the moment he presses his eye to the lens. Mike peers through the lens immediately after and clenches his jaw; he rushes off down the aisle toward Ben, Bill, and Richie as Beverly looks as well. “He looks so _creepy_ ,” she murmurs.

“He looks different than he did in the Barrens,” Eddie says as she pulls away. She stays leaned over the desk, blinking up at Eddie. “He looks - I mean, the makeup and stuff is creepy, but he looks normal there. His head isn’t all -” he gestures around his own head, miming the bloated, bulbous shape he’d seen in the Barrens.

“He’s still _human_ there,” Stan says, strangled. “When was that article written?”

“Eighteen seventy-one,” Eddie says after checking the date. “He was in the picture at the Silver Dollar in eighteen seventy-nine.”

Mike appears at the end of the aisle with Bill, Richie, and Ben on his heels. “So sometime between eighteen seventy-one and eighteen seventy-nine, Bob Grey was - possessed? Is that - would that be the right word?” Beverly asks desperately.

“It had to be in eighteen seventy-one,” says Mike. “He was a clown in a traveling circus that happened to pass through Derry, and those never stayed in one town for too long. Whatever happened to him had to have happened while he was in town, which would have been a couple of weeks at most.”

“What if he decided to settle down here _before_ whatever happened?” Richie asks as he squints through the lens. “Maybe he decided it was time to live an honest life and trade out his clown car for a clown house.”

Stan smacks Richie’s upper arm. “This is serious, Richie,” he says.

“I’m also being serious,” Richie says - not a trace of mirth in his eyes as he pulls away to meet Stan’s gaze. “He could have stuck around after the circus moved on. Also, how do we know that the clown _thing_ didn’t just _see_ ol’ Bob Grey working at the circus and decide that it would just look like him between turning into scary fucking monsters? That way it could still get to the grocery store or catch a movie when it gets sick of kidnapping kids -”

“Beep beep, Richie,” Beverly interrupts.

“No, I think Richie has a point,” says Mike, and Richie looks disproportionately surprised at the unexpected support. “All we know for sure is that Bob Grey was part of a traveling circus and happens to look like the clown we’ve been seeing. We don’t actually have any hard evidence that he stayed in Derry after the circus moved on.”

“W-w-we don’t have eh-eh-evidence that he l-l-luh-heft, either,” Bill says fiercely.

“Which leads to my point,” Mike says, a cautious, defensive hand raised close to his chest. “We should see if we can find any evidence of Bob Grey staying in Derry after eighteen seventy-one. See if there are other news articles written after this one that mention him. Maybe there are public records of a car title or a deed to a house with his name on it. Guys,” he smiles at them all, a small, earnest thing that stokes at something warm and alive at the center of Eddie’s chest. “This is good. We have a name, we have a _lead_. We’re gonna get to the bottom of this.”

Three days pass before their next breakthrough, and the tangerine sunshine spilling slanted through the windows that afternoon finds Eddie at the viewfinder once more, head bowed over the lens, stifling a yawn behind his fist. He’s fairly certain he’s on the verge of blindness, or perhaps a permanent migraine, and from the weary expressions on Stan’s and Beverly’s faces across the desk from him and the exhausted slump of Richie’s shoulders beside him, he’d venture to guess his friends aren’t far behind. Eddie heaves a sigh and straightens his back, eyes closed against the muscles stretching and tingling at the slow arch of his spine and backwards pull on both shoulders.

He’s just settling in again when he hears quick footsteps approaching from the aisle to his left.

Ben, Bill, and Mike appear in a muted stampede, a wrinkled magazine clutched tightly in Ben’s hands. “Guys,” Ben says breathlessly as he slams the magazine on the desk between Richie and Stan. “Look at what we found.”

The cover image is grainy and colorless, but clearly shows a house set back in a large, empty lot, dotted to the right by tall sunflowers and neat, pristine bushes. Construction material litters the right side of the lawn, and through the open second-story window Eddie thinks he can see a distorted figure that might be a construction worker.

“This house was built around the well that the original settlers used to use when Derry was just a beaver trapping camp,” Mike says excitedly. “The same well where piles of bloody clothes were found after the original settlers disappeared in seventeen forty-one.”

“The w-w-well is also c-connected to the Derry s-s-s-sewer system,” says Bill. “And it’s c-c-close to the trainyard where M-M-Muh-Mike saw the c-clown, _and_ it’s where -”

“Where I saw the dead boys,” Stan says, loud and hoarse. Both Mike and Ben glance automatically over their shoulders at the outburst, but Bill holds Stan’s gaze steadily. “That’s the house - that’s _the house._ The _same one_ where I saw those boys, they were _right there_ on _that porch_ -”

“ _Stan_ ,” Beverly whispers, gripping both of his shoulders and pulling him closer to her, away from the magazine. “Hey, it’s okay, it’s - it’s just a picture, it’s _okay_.”

“That’s not all,” says Ben softly - almost apologetically. “We read the article about the house and - it mentioned the homeowner by name.”

“Bob Grey?” Eddie prompts when Ben falls silent, and Bill nods.

“Holy shit,” Richie mutters, dragging the magazine closer to stare at the cover image. “This is from the same year as the newspaper article Eddie found. So he - Bob Grey got here in seventeen forty-one with a traveling circus, bought this house, and…”

He trails, glancing up at Eddie. “It must have come from the well,” Eddie says slowly. “Maybe - maybe it was like whatever happened to me in the Standpipe, maybe that’s why the house looks the way it does now. The house was built _around_ the well, not over it, right?”

“That’s what the article said. The well is in the basement, but it’s still intact. Or it was when they built the house. The house was built as a protective measure because the well was starting to fall apart exposed to the elements, and the house was given historical monument status and sold before construction was even complete. They don’t have any pictures of Bob in the article, but they mention him by name a few times. The town paid for a lot of the bills because of the historical monument status, and Bob was the highest bidder at the town auction.”

“That house is a fucking _nightmare_ now,” Stan says, still sort of strangled with panic. “Not just ‘cause of what I saw, I mean - Eddie’s right, the whole thing is falling apart. One big storm would just wipe it completely out. If it’s _actually_ a historical monument, wouldn’t someone in town still be taking care of it?”

“N-n-not if n-no one else can s-s-s-see it,” Bill says slowly. “I nuh-know I’ve been d-d-duh-hown Neibolt street a f-f-few times, but - I d-d-don’t think I r-r-remember ever s-seeing this h-h-house there before. I c-c-can’t even p-picture where it would b-b-be on the s-street -”

Richie, Ben, and Beverly murmur in agreement, but Eddie catches Mike and Stan exchanging an uneasy glance. “It’s at the end,” he says, and Mike and Stan snap toward him. “Right on the corner. I walk past it every time I go to the trainyard to watch the trains - you guys have never seen it? It creeps me out every time I walk past it.”

“It always feels like someone’s watching me through the windows,” Mike murmurs, gaze glassy and unfocused. “I can’t even look directly at it anymore, it feels like - like it’s just waiting to swallow me.”

“Th-th-that’s where it l-lives,” Bill says, jaw stiff. “That’s w-w-where we’ll f-f-f-find it.”

Stan lets out a quiet, choked whimper. “I can’t go back there, Bill,” he whispers. “I _can’t_.”

Beverly tightens her grip on Stan’s shoulders, and Eddie leans forward to catch his darting gaze. “You won’t be alone this time,” Eddie says firmly, watching Stan’s chest move rapidly with the shallow breaths passing his parted lips. “We’ll be together. He can’t hurt us if we’re together, right?”

“We don’t know that.”

“He _can’t_ hurt us if we’re together, Stan. He _can’t_. I _know_ that, okay? I _know_ that he can’t hurt us if we’re together, but I’ll - I’ll _die_ before I let him hurt you, Stan.”

Stan recoils slightly, eyes widening in time with Beverly’s sharp gasp. “ _Eddie_ ,” says Richie sharply.

“I’m not gonna let him hurt any of us,” Eddie presses, ignoring both Richie and Beverly, focusing solely on the fear slowly diminishing in Stan’s eyes. “We’re gonna go find him and try to talk to him, but I’m gonna keep all of us safe until we can get through to him. I _swear_ , Stan. He won’t hurt you.”

Stan clenches his jaw and holds Eddie’s gaze, before nodding stiffly. “Okay,” he says quietly. “I believe you.”

-

The Well House on Neibolt Street stands in defiant ruins, starkly out of place against a blinding, brilliant blue July sky. Fat white clouds roll in a distant, alluring promise along the horizon, but despite the distinct lack of shadows, everything about the house seems shrouded in darkness. Eddie’s nerves seize up in his chest, coiling tighter and tighter with each pass of his pedals carrying him steadily closer to the rotting shambles at the end of the street. Beside him, Stan swallows loudly; his skin has taken on a grey and waxy pallor, chin actively quivering and knuckles bone-white on his handlebars.

Eddie swerves a little closer and smiles his most gentle and comforting smile when Stan glances at him. Stan exhales and smiles back tentatively.

The street as a whole is eerily still and silent as they approach; Eddie can’t even hear the trains roaring by in the trainyard or the distant sounds of cars driving down parallel streets, just the distant hum of the cicadas and his own breathing. Each house lining the street is shuttered, curtains drawn; no children shriek with laughter in summer games spanning unseen backyards. The stillness is unnerving.

Bill draws up outside the house first, one foot planted on the curb, studying the decaying outward face so closely it’s as if he expects the house to come alive at any moment. His lips twitch in small, repetitive movements, almost like he’s whispering to himself near-silently as the others slowly pull even with him and dismount their bikes. Eddie maneuvers to stand beside him, keeping his eyes focused on the house while straining to listen.

“He th-th-thrusts his f-fists against the p-p-p-puh-puh- _fuck_ ,” Bill mutters.

Stan’s breathing is loud and harsh in Eddie’s ears, his hand slick and clammy beneath Eddie’s fingers. Bill pushes the dilapidated fence open and takes the first tentative step over the perimeter, shoes scuffing along the cracked path up to the front door.

Eddie files in after him, pulling Stan along, and then Richie and Beverly step through at the same time, and then Ben, and then Mike, who pulls the gate closed behind them. They make it about halfway across the yard before Bill pauses, head tilted back as he stares up at the house in silence.

Beverly skirts past Eddie and Stan, her gaze fixated on the back of Bill’s head. “We don’t have to go in there today,” she says softly, palm grazing up his upper arm. “We can wait, we can go in tomorrow -”

“No,” Bill interrupts. “No, it has to be today.” He turns away from the house and meets Beverly’s gaze before turning to the others. “Look, you guys don’t have to go in there with me. None of you asked for this, and - I’ll understand. But...what happens when another Georgie goes missing? Or another Betty, or another Eddie C.? What happens - what happens when it’s one of _us_? I can’t - I can’t pretend like this isn’t happening the way all the adults keep telling me to. For me, walking into this house will be a hundred times easier than walking into my own house, because my house is the one place I know Georgie _isn’t_. I have to do this. I _need_ to do this. For Georgie.”

He turns away before anyone can respond, squares his shoulders, and starts back up the path. “Wow,” Richie breathes from somewhere behind Eddie.

“What?” Ben murmurs.

“He didn’t stutter once.”

Beverly takes a half-step backwards and glances down at the tall yellow grass to her left; she stoops down for a second, and when she straightens, she’s clutching a rusted iron post that appears ripped from the fenceline. The sight of it in her fists seems to snap the others out of it; all at once, they begin moving, shuffling after Bill.

Stan squeezes Eddie’s hand. “Someone should stay out here and keep watch,” he says, grimacing in half-fear, half-apology. “I mean - what if something happens out here?”

Bill’s gripping the doorknob, paused on the threshold, staring hard at Stan. “Okay,” he says after a moment. “Who wants to stay out here?”

Eddie sees hands shoot up like corn stalks on all sides; a quick glance around confirms that only he refrained from raising his hand. Bill’s jaw visibly clenches, but he nods a silent thanks to Eddie and motions him up on the porch.

“Wait,” Richie calls when Eddie reaches the stairs. “I - I’ll go, too.”

“Are you sure?” Eddie asks. “You don’t have to -”

“Well you said it yourself, before - we’re safer with bigger numbers, right? I’ll go with you guys and you guys -” he looks back at Ben, Mike, Beverly, and Stan clustered together halfway down the path “- will keep each other safe. Yeah?”

Eddie glances hesitantly at Bill, but Bill is already nodding at Richie. “Let’s go,” he says.

The rotting stench of decay and raw sewage rolls over them in a thick, oppressive wave the moment Bill pushes the front door open, and Eddie bites down hard on the inside of his own cheek to stop himself from retching. Bill steps over the threshold cautiously, throwing glances in either direction as Richie and Eddie edge inside behind him; sunlight pours in at their backs and seeps in through the gaps in the boards nailed over the windows, casting the place in a dim, ethereal glow. Each footfall stirs thin clouds of dust that swirl angrily through narrow shafts of sunlight.

Movement by a dilapidated fireplace catches Eddie’s eye off to the right; he glances over just in time to catch sight of a thin rat scurrying through a gnawed hole in the wall, vanishing from sight.

“Don’t breathe through your mouth,” he hears Richie warn somewhere behind him.

“Why?” he asks, squinting at the odd carvings over the fireplace.

“‘Cause then you’re eating it.”

Eddie can’t stop himself from retching this time.

He’s only just made out what the carving says - _GOOD CHEER GOOD FRIENDS_ \- when Richie begins screaming.

“ _What is this_?” Richie shrilly demands. Eddie whips around and spots both Richie and Bill in the room across the entryway from where Eddie wandered, clutching a tattered letterman jacket between the two of them. It’s familiar enough - he’s seen enough high school kids in various sports wearing them around Derry. “ _Bill_!” Richie shrieks, twisting the jacket around and brandishing a finger over the right breast. “ _That’s my name! It’s covered in blood and it’s my name! It’s MY FUCKING NAME_!”

Eddie claps a hand over his mouth, heart freezing to solid ice.

“It’s not real!” Bill says, pulling the jacket from Richie’s hands. “Richie, it’s not real! It’s not real, look - you don’t, you don’t even play any sports, this isn’t real!”

“Why is it all ripped up?” Richie asks, and it almost sounds like a whimper. “Why is it all _ripped up_ , why is there so much _blood_? _Whose blood is it_?”

“ _No one’s_ , because _it isn’t real_.” Bill hurls the jacket to one side and grabs Richie by both shoulders, shaking him just hard enough that Richie’s eyes dart from the discarded jacket to Bill’s face. “This is what it does,” Bill says. “It makes you see things that aren’t real. It’s trying to scare you. Don’t let it, okay? _Nothing_ it shows you is real.”

Richie visibly trembles in Bill’s grasp, but he nods after a moment, and Bill releases him. Eddie steps forward on instinct, hands lifting from his mouth toward Richie - to what end, he isn’t sure - but before he can get close enough to touch, they hear a muffled thump over their heads.

All three boys freeze, heads turned toward the dingy, cobwebbed staircase tucked along the wall beside the fireplace. A thick silence envelopes the house - not even the swelling sounds of the crickets outside reach through the boarded windows - until they hear it again, another _thump_ followed by the distinctive sounds of something heavy dragging across the floor.

“C’mon,” Bill whispers.

 _I have superpowers_ , Eddie reminds himself as he follows Bill and Richie slowly up the staircase. _I have superpowers, and I can protect them and myself from anything. He can’t hurt us as long as I’m around._

They reach the top of the staircase in a small herd, spilling out into the middle of a long, narrow hallway. Less sunlight penetrates the darkness up here - most of the rotted doors down either end of the hall are closed, and only two small, circular windows punctuate either end of the hall. Eddie casts nervous glances in either direction as Bill slowly creeps further into the hall, willing his eyes to adjust faster, heart throbbing uncomfortably at the thought of unnecessary vulnerability.

A sound - quiet and rasping - catches his attention to his right. It almost sounds the way he used to sound when teetering on the edge of an asthma attack, thin and rattling and _sickly_. Eddie swallows thickly and turns toward the sound, letting out a tremulous breath of his own as his feet shuffle unevenly over the creaking floorboards.

“D’you guys hear that?” he whispers without looking back.

Bill and Richie remain silent, but Eddie can hear their footsteps just behind him, so he inches forward. A small eternity passes before he makes it to the far end of the hall - eyes trained on the last door on the right, firmly shut, and the loud, labored breathing beyond it intensifies.

“Hello?” Eddie calls hesitantly. He presses his palm to the door.

The rattling cuts off the moment his skin makes contact, and at the same time a quiet voice crackles to life at the other end of the hall. Eddie jumps, already feeling the whiplash as he starts toward the sound, but the pain of it is immediately the furthest thing from his mind because _Richie and Bill are all the way on the other end of the hall_.

They’re both looking at him with as much shock and confusion as he himself feels. “Eddie?” Richie says.

“What the hell?” Eddie says at the same time.

Richie takes one step toward him, and the door at the end of the hall suddenly slams shut between them.

“ _Fuck_!” Eddie shrieks, taking off down the hall at a dead sprint. He can hear Bill and Richie screaming on the other side of the door, their words incomprehensible over the deafening sounds of their fists pounding against the door. “Guys!” Eddie shouts, slamming his shoulder into the unforgiving wood and wrenching at the doorknob with all his might. It does not budge. “ _Shit!_ Shit, guys, watch out, I’m -”

The floor suddenly gives beneath his weight and Eddie screams, only just catching himself in a hover, staring down beneath his feet through open air at the dusty floorboards plummeting to the ground in a dank kitchen on the floor directly below. “ _Eddie_?” Bill demands through the door.

“I’m okay! Watch out, I’m gonna break the door down!”

He shifts away from the door, across the slowly widening gap in the floor, eyes trained on the rotted, peeling paint. Bill and Richie have gone quiet on the other side; Eddie’s ears ring with the sounds of his racing heart, his breaths coming in loud, short bursts.

A thick, steely band of _something_ wraps around his chest like a vice, squeezing the air from his lungs and driving his shoulders backwards in one quick movement. “ _Time to float_ ,” a voice croaks in his ear just before he’s slammed sideways into the wall.

His vision goes black and the rest of his senses swim for what feels like a very, very long time. The pain of it - whatever it was - registers in a distant, hazy kind of way, but intensifies sharply as he struggles through the disorientation. Faded colors pop and burst against his closed eyelids, and the groan that vibrates through his throat sounds muffled and warped in his ears.

He blinks, and his surroundings slowly take solid shape; he’s staring up at a sizable hole in the ceiling, only just discernible through a thick cloud of dust whirling over his head. Sharp pain ekes through his right arm, bursting like a supernova somewhere down below his elbow but rendering the whole thing heavy and useless up to his shoulder. He slowly, painstakingly sits up, and is immediately greeted by the sight of a dingy refrigerator that might have once been white, now scratched to hell and smeared in dirt and yellowed from time and neglect. The kitchen table lays in splintered ruins around and beneath him, faded blue-white paint only just visible in the larger chunks of wood that survived impact from his dead weight. He can see the beginnings of the cabinets and the counter to his left, skirting past his line of vision to line the far corner and the wall directly behind him.

His head spins and his vision swims for a prolonged moment, only settling when he closes his eyes and presses the heel of his hand against his temple and focuses on breathing. Pain erupts across his scalp on contact, jackhammering deep through his skull at the epicenter beneath his hand; he remembers belatedly the feeling of slamming into the wall upstairs, and groans at the realization that he’s likely got a concussion.

His right arm juts out at an odd, almost forty-five degree angle away from his body, visibly broken about halfway down the length of his forearm, taunting him when he finally manages to wrench his eyes open once more. He tucks it up close to his belly and hisses at the blinding pain that wrenches through his body at the light movement, teeth grit to bite back a scream.

The thin sounds of scuttling from directly in front of him break through the disorientation. Eddie looks up to the sight of a disembodied hand wrapped around the side of the fridge door - not disembodied, no, coming from _inside the fridge._ Eddie scrambles backwards on instinct with his one good hand, unable to blink even with the searing pain throbbing in his skull - a - a _creature_ -

“ _Eddie_ ,” the creature rasps, and Eddie hears himself whimper. It’s a person - or it _was_ a person at some point. Its skin hangs loose and peeling over its face, drooping obscenely over the line of its jaw, bursting pustules oozing down its forehead and dripping onto rotted, tattered clothes hanging from its thin body. One of its eyes has rotted completely out of its skull and the other bulges in its socket, blood-shot and watery and unnaturally milky. A large, gaping hole sits where a nose has rotted off, thin tissues fluttering with each of its horrible, haunting breaths in. It heaves a rattling sigh through cracked, bleeding lips, thin sunlight illuminating a single chipped, blackened tooth sitting crookedly in its pale gums. It lurches toward him and he lets out an involuntary shriek, scrambling backwards until his shoulders hit the solid surface of the cabinets along the far wall. “ _Eddie_ ,” it rasps again, dragging a clubbed foot toward him, reaching for him with crooked fingers and blackened, broken nails.

Eddie twists his head and thrusts his good hand out blindly as it closes in, shouting in abject horror when he feels something warm and wet against his palm. A heavy weight lays forward on his hand, and his arm begins to tremble, and the rattling breath grows louder, and Eddie can’t form a single coherent thought through the deafening sounds of panicked static vibrating in his skull.

“ _Ed-die_ ,” it says again, louder and more sing-song, and when Eddie wrenches his eyes open he finds the face of the clown - _Pennywise_ \- just inches from his own. A thin line of saliva drips from his red lips, dark amusement twisting his face into a bone-chilling smile.

“Bob,” Eddie chokes, and Bob’s face twitches. “Bob, please - _please_ , I know you’re in there, I know - please, I’m h- _hurt,_ I need help -”

Bob reaches a gloved hand down and wraps it around Eddie’s throat, pressing down just hard enough to narrow Eddie’s windpipe without cutting it off. “Oh, I can _smell_ it,” he whispers, leaning in ever closer, unblinking when Eddie manages to whack him in the side of the head a few times with the heel of his good hand. “I can smell your fear,” he whispers, snatching his flailing arm by the wrist and bringing it close to his face. He noses around his own fingers against Eddie’s wrist and inhales deeply, eyes rolling beneath his fluttering eyelids. “Such _tasty_ fear,” he hisses, pressing the cold flats of his teeth to Eddie’s forearm.

“ _Please_ ,” Eddie shrieks, trying and failing to pull his arm free, “ _please_ -”

“I expected so much _more_ from you,” he mutters as Eddie chokes on his own tears, turning his head just slightly to meet Eddie’s gaze with narrowed eyes. “ _This_ is the _best_ you can do?”

Eddie yanks his good arm fruitlessly, unable to break his grip or stop the desperate noises of terror spilling out between his teeth.

“Tasty, _tasty_ , _beautiful_ fear,” he whispers, shifting his body forward, pulling Eddie’s arm down and leaning over Eddie. His lips pull back over his teeth - suddenly yellow, needle-like things - rows upon rows of them as his lips pull back ever further, jaw widening and unhinging before his eyes. _Not human not humannothumanNOTHUMAN_ , Eddie screams in his mind. Eddie pulls at his good arm again and feels his shoulders slam against the cabinets once, twice, three times as his body instinctively wrestles toward escape.

It suddenly freezes, Its grip around Eddie’s wrist tightening just enough to cut off the circulation to his fingers. It presses Its hand still on Eddie’s throat down harder, hard enough that Eddie gurgles on his next labored inhale.

Over his own hysterical panic, he registers the distant sounds of footsteps thundering down a staircase and petrified, familiar voices shouting. It twists around fully, releasing Eddie’s good arm while doubling the pressure on his windpipe; Eddie’s only just started clawing at the hand around his throat when the kitchen door bursts open from the outside and Bill and Richie spill into the room.

“ _Eddie_!” Richie shouts the moment the door swings open, gaze darting wildly around the room; both he and Bill freeze when Pennywise lets out a passable imitation of Eddie’s pitiful whimper. “ _Oh, fuck, Eddie_ ,” Richie breathes.

“This isn’t real enough for you, Billy?” asks Pennywise, pressing harder against Eddie’s throat. Blackness begins to creep along the edges of Eddie’s vision as he gurgles again, but he can still see the way Bill’s jaw clenches. “ _I’m_ not real enough for you?”

Eddie’s only distantly aware of his feet scrabbling uselessly against the ground, shifting the broken kitchen table shards around noisily, only adding to the rising panic fluttering between his ribs - he can’t breathe, he can’t _breathe,_ sweet Mother Mary and Joseph he’s going to _die_ -

“It was real enough for _Georgie_!” Pennywise crows with a mocking laugh. Bill’s face and neck flush bright red; his chest heaves only once before he charges forward and Pennywise lunges toward him with a hair-raising snarl at the same time, and Eddie coughs and greedily heaves in as much dusty, clogged air as he can get.

The room feels seconds away from shattering into madness as Eddie’s consciousness swims, and he doesn’t fully jerk back to reality until he feels large, familiar hands on his face, forcibly twisting his head up and to the right. He blinks up at Richie’s pale, horrified face and clutches his right arm closer to his chest, trying to pin down a rational thought through the haze of his own heart-stopping terror.

“Don’t look at it!” Richie shouts in his face, forcing Eddie to keep his head turned toward him despite the chaos unfolding in their peripheral. Eddie can still see it even without turning his head - Pennywise staggering in the center of the room, skull run all the way through with the fencepost Beverly picked up when they were milling in the yard. Beverly’s there, too, fumbling backwards, wide gaze fixated on Pennywise as It lurches and thrashes in sharp, jerky movements; Ben, Mike, and Stan hover at the edge of the kitchen, backlit by a window busted wide open and spilling bright sunlight into the room. He can hear Bill grunting to his left; he knows without looking that Bill, too, is staring at Pennywise, watching It touch with fumbling fingers around the entry and exit points the fencepost makes in Its head. “Don’t look at it, Eddie, don’t look at it!” Richie shouts, and Eddie blinks up at him, distantly wondering whether it’s Stan or Ben screaming themselves hoarse like that in the background. “ _Eddie_!”

Pennywise lets out a long, piercing howl - animalistic and feral in a way that has Eddie instinctively scrambling backwards again - and when It lowers Its hand, the white glove disintegrates as dark, coarse fur erupts from beneath. The fencepost is still firmly lodged through Its skull, but Its skull is morphing - a snout elongating out of Its mouth and nose, those same needle teeth curving and elongating and dripping thick, foamy saliva. Its whole body shudders, Its shoulders broaden and hunch, Its spine curves and cracks; Its silvery jumpsuit ripples and shifts into a familiar letterman jacket -

From the corner of his eye, Eddie sees Richie glance at Pennywise; he knows they both spot the name _Tozier_ embroidered over the right breast at the same time.

“ _Don’t look at it, Eddie!_ ” Richie shouts, tapping Eddie’s cheeks with his flattened fingers as Pennywise takes a jerking, lurching step toward them, still transforming. “Look at me! Just look at me, don’t look at it, _look at me! I’m right here, look at me!_ ”

Eddie looks at Richie.

He’s only dimly aware of Pennywise lashing long, yellowed claws around at Ben, Mike, and Stan on the far edge of the room; he hears a strangled shout and the heavy sounds of a body or possibly two collapsing to the floor, but he forces himself to hold Richie’s gaze, to focus solely on the familiar bright blue peering down at him through dirty, smudged lenses.

Bill’s gripping his left shoulder tightly - which of them it’s meant to ground is beyond Eddie - but as the sounds of Pennywise’s struggling grow more muffled, his grip shifts, more weight pressing down from above. “Don’t let It get away!” he hears Bill shout, and the cacophony reaches a fever pitch as Bill’s grip leaves his arm altogether.

Richie’s still holding Eddie’s face in place but he’s looking away, now, looking toward the door where he and Bill first came in, his expression some awful, nauseating combination of terror and rage. “What the _fuck, Bill_!” he screams, shifting his weight forward to lean over Eddie.

“Eddie,” Beverly’s hushed voice comes from his left, and Richie’s hands shift to his shoulder and his chest when Eddie jerks toward her. “Eddie, listen to me, you have to calm down, you have to heal yourself.”

“ _Bill!_ ” Richie screams. “ _We have to help Eddie!_ ”

“ _Focus_ , Eddie,” Beverly says loudly.

He shakes his head frantically, unable to comprehend through the blinding haze of pain burrowing deep inside his bones. Stan’s still screaming. “Eds,” says Richie urgently as he forces Eddie to turn his head back to the right, “hey, it’s okay, It’s gone, It’s _gone_ now, you _gotta_ heal yourself -” He shakes his head again, clutching his arm tighter. Bill rushes back into the room, still so frighteningly pale, but looking newly determined. “ _We gotta get him outta here!_ ” Richie shouts. “Mike, _Mike_ -”

Richie falls away from Eddie’s side and Mike rushes toward him, stepping over Eddie’s legs and scooping him up off the floor with ease. Eddie clutches at Mike’s neck with his good arm and tries to scream in pain, but finds his lungs empty; he gasps, realizing belatedly that the screaming he thought was coming from Stan was actually himself all along.

Mike rushes him toward that open window and leaps down into the grass outside, grimacing out an apology at jostling Eddie more than strictly necessary. Eddie squeezes his eyes shut and grits his teeth until he feels the unforgiving edges of Mike’s bike basket digging into the soft skin behind his knees. He can hear the others screaming to each other, barking out directions he can’t be bothered with trying to understand. It feels like every molecule in his body has been ripped out of him and shoved back in again in the wrong order, like his very bones are trying to vibrate out of his skin and shoot off into the stratosphere. He can feel wind on his face but he can’t comprehend it; all he knows is agony and terror.

The wind slows and stops and then hands curve up under his armpits, hefting him up and out of the bike basket. The asphalt grits and crunches beneath rushed footsteps all around him as someone - Mike, presumably - briefly sets him on his feet before scooping him back up again, carrying him forward toward - something.

He’s sat down on a cushioned bench, and then he feels hands on his face again; he wrenches his eyes open and his vision is blocked by Richie’s face, shining with sweat. “Eddie,” Richie chokes, “Eddie, it’s okay, it’s okay now, we’re okay. You’re okay. You have to heal yourself, Eds, you _have_ to -”

“Guys, is that -”

“Oh, shit, it’s Mrs. K -”

“My _ma_?” Eddie shrieks, and Richie glances back over his shoulder. Eddie can hear voices - his mother’s rising hysteria drowning everything else out - and then Richie leans forward again, hunched over Eddie like he’s trying to shield him from the brewing storm.

“Eddie,” Richie says urgently, “you _have_ to heal yourself, _right now_ -”

“I _can’t_ -”

“ _Get your filthy hands off my son_!” Sonia shrieks, appearing in a brief flash over Richie’s shoulder before Richie suddenly collapses to one side. Sonia blocks Richie from Eddie’s view, but Eddie’s pretty sure Richie’s sprawled out on the ground - or the floor, possibly, he still has absolutely no sense of where he is -

In a terrifyingly familiar move, Sonia reaches toward Eddie’s neck with a thick, meaty hand, but before he can even move to bat it away she’s got a grip around the scruff of his neck and is forcing him up off the bench. She’s still blocking Richie from his view, but he can see the others scattered haphazardly around a familiar front yard - he realizes with a jolt that he’s being marched off of the Urises front porch and across the front yard toward his mother’s station wagon idling at the curb.

“Mrs. K, we were a-attacked -” Bill starts.

“I don’t want to hear it!” Sonia screams, and Eddie sees Bill quail from the corner of his eye. The others watch in silence as Sonia flings the passenger’s door open and forces Eddie inside.

He winces as the door slams shut and stares down at his knees, willing his racing heart to settle in his chest. His mother’s voice is muffled and unintelligible through the door, but the bitter, biting tone is unmistakable. He hears Beverly’s softer voice pleading, but Sonia cuts her off with a few harsh words and storms around the front of the car in a blurry mass of pastel nylon. He isn’t brave enough to look up until they’ve turned onto Main Street, racing toward the Emergency Room.

Later - much, much later, after the buzz of fear and adrenaline has eased off in the presence of well-meaning but mostly indifferent nurses and doctors - Eddie lies awake in his hospital bed, arm dully throbbing beneath a pristine white cast, staring up at the shadowy ceiling over his head. Light from a street lamp outside pours in unfiltered through the window, throwing the whole room into an artificial orange glow that somehow seeps through his closed eyelids. His mother lays snoring in a cot just beside him; the bed is elevated enough that it isn’t directly in his ear, thankfully, but it’s still impossibly loud and grating.

It doesn’t bother him as much as it probably should, all things considered - he’s fairly positive he wouldn’t be sleeping even if it was pitch dark and silent.

(Probably _especially_ not then.)

Each passing thump of a footstep outside his door, each quiet hiss of wheels rolling along tile yanks harshly at Eddie’s barely-recovered nerves sitting in a raw, vulnerable bundle right in the hollow of his throat. He can’t shake the panicky feeling of being watched, eyes darting to each corner of the room, half-expecting to see the leper come limping toward him just before its rotted fingernails go digging into the flesh of his face; he shudders and pulls the blankets up to his nose, trying to focus on the sense memory of Richie’s hands holding his face.

It takes the edge off his panic just enough for him to fitfully doze until dawn.

He’s discharged early the next morning - the nurses dismissed Sonia’s request to keep him another night for further observation - and Eddie drifts in and out of focus on the long drive home, his mother’s voice a droning buzz in his ears underscored by the muted rattle of antibiotics and painkillers rattling in prescription bottles between his feet. “You’re _done_ with those dirty little miscreants you call friends, Edward,” she says haughtily as they idle at a red light. “And you’re staying inside until you get through this sickness. _No_ arguments.”

He ignores the tears pricking at the backs of his eyes and the sharp, keening pain of helplessness knotted in his throat. This isn’t the first time she’s threatened him with this, not by a long-shot, but something - something about this feels monumental and permanent, jarring all the way down to his broken bones. “Yes, mommy,” he says hoarsely, willing himself not to cry in front of her.

He breaks the moment they pull into the driveway, only catching a brief glimpse of his bike’s familiar handlebars over the top of the bush along the side of the house before his vision fully blurs with tears. Someone must have brought his bike to Stan’s house as they escaped, or else _gone back for it_ after Eddie was hustled away, and brought it all the way back here for him. He had completely forgotten about his bike in the haze of terror and agony.

He had forgotten the person he was the last time he rode that bike.

Sonia frog-marches him to his room and forces him back into bed, tutting as she tucks the blankets around his body so tightly he’d probably never be able to get out if not for the super strength. She plants a wet, lingering kiss to his forehead, thumbs over his cheek a little harder than he thinks is strictly necessary, and bustles out of his room.

He waits until he hears the lock click from the outside.

He kicks the blankets off of his body and squeezes his eyes shut, sighing in relief as the familiar breeze ruffles his hair and drains the pain from his arm. The yellow Post-It Note at the bottom left corner of his window practically screamed into his line of vision the moment they walked through the door, but by sheer luck his mother hadn’t spotted it. It’s stuck to the outside of the window; carefully, Eddie eases the window open and reaches outside to grab it, recognizing the handwriting before he even reads the words.

_Brought your bike back safe._

_Sorry for everything._

_Call me if you can._

_\- Richie_

Eddie clutches the note to his chest and closes his eyes, the ghosts of Richie’s hands pressing against his face once more.

-

July whittles away slowly, scorching heat warming his perpetually closed bedroom window beneath his palm. There is a mostly-forgotten but familiar restlessness burning beneath his skin - a quivering, tentative reach for freedom he has not felt since he was ten years old. He can see the neighbor kids running up and down the sidewalk, their care-free chatter loud enough that Eddie can almost follow the conversation through the closed window. He sighs and thunks his forehead against the glass, in the exact same spot as the day before, and the day before that, and the day before that.

Sleep - what precious little of it he manages to get when the sun dips below the horizon and darkness presses against the window panes - remains plagued by distorted nightmares. He dreams of the leper, chasing him down alleys and cornering him behind the pharmacy; he dreams of the werewolf stalking him through the Barrens, glowing yellow eyes tracking him between the trees, long tongue licking threateningly over needle-sharp, blood-stained teeth.

Eddie hasn’t been sleeping well.

Shockingly, his mother does not seem to notice. If anything, she seems to worry and fret over him less now that she has a certified, doctor-issued excuse to keep him locked inside at all hours of the day; Eddie rarely sees her leave the La-Z Boy in the dimly lit living room for anything other than meal times at the kitchen table or hovering in his bedroom doorway while he pretends to take his medication.

Eddie aches with loneliness.

He called Richie the day after got home from the hospital, listening intently as Richie hysterically filled him in on the argument and subsequent fight that happened in Stan’s front yard after Eddie left. His mother caught him about five minutes in, seizing the phone with a desolate wail before Eddie could so much as _speak_ and slamming it down on the receiver so hard the brittle plastic shatters.

She does not bother buying a replacement; Eddie does not hear from Richie again.

Alicia Rodriguez, Jessica Kirkpatrick, Billy Thorne, Molly Cohen, and Patrick Hockstetter disappear in the weeks that follow.

Eddie wakes on the last day of July with a hot, familiar desperation curdling deep in the pit of his gut. It’s only 7:15, according to the clock above his desk, and his mother doesn’t normally unlock his bedroom door until after 8, but he feels like a cornered animal seconds away from - from self-annihilation, or something.

So Eddie gets out of bed.

He dresses in about 5 minutes and grabs the first pill bottle he can find, glancing only briefly at the label before quickly crossing the room and pushing his bedroom window open. He twists the cap off the bottle and flings the meager contents out into the side yard, briefly wondering if he could get away with hovering down into the yard to bury the pills.

He sees a woman pushing a stroller across the street, and a man walking a golden retriever beside her. He pushes his window closed.

His mother finally unlocks his door at 8:02, and Eddie slides off the edge of his bed where he’s been perched for the last forty-five minutes and makes a bee-line toward the bathroom. He listens to her lumbering footsteps descend the stairs, to the distant sounds of the television flaring to life, to the distinct groans of the La-Z Boy chair sagging beneath her weight.

He grabs the empty pill bottle from his room on his way toward the stairs.

“Mommy?”

Sonia hums her acknowledgement, eyes never straying from the television. Eddie steps into the living room carefully, watching errant blue shadows dance across her ruddy face. “I’m out of my antibiotics,” he says, presenting the empty bottle when her eyes finally slide over him. “Would it be okay if I went to the pharmacy and got a refill?”

She leans forward a bit, eyeing the bottle warily. “Shouldn’t I drive you, sweetie?” she asks. “With your arm -”

“It’s okay, I - it doesn’t hurt so much today. I’d like the fresh air, too, I think.”

“Are you not getting enough air all the way up there? I’ve _told_ you heat rises, Eddie, it’s dangerous to sleep upstairs in the summers, we should get you set up on the couch in here -”

“No, no, that’s okay, it’s not - I’m, I’m not too warm up there, I just - ‘cause we keep the windows closed all the time -”

“Open windows let all the pollen in, and you know how allergic you are to pollen, Eddie-bear,” Sonia sighs, but her attention is already diverted back to the television. “My show just started - alright, sweetie, you can walk to Keene’s and back. Fifteen minutes, okay?”

“Okay. Thank you, mommy.”

Fifteen minutes doesn’t give him a _lot_ of time, but Eddie can’t stop himself from strolling down the sidewalk, breathing in as deep as his lungs will allow. His friend group is splintered to pieces and he hasn’t seen any of them in far too long and a horrible, flesh-eating monster is stalking the streets of his town, but the air has honestly never tasted sweeter.

He steps into Keene’s with a smile on his face for the first time in recent history and doesn’t even falter when he’s greeted by the sight of Gretta Keene lazily blowing bubbles with her gum behind the counter. Mr. Keene greets him warmly and takes the empty pill bottle Eddie offers him, bustling off somewhere into the bowels of the back storage area, leaving Eddie alone with Gretta.

She’s flipping disinterestedly through a magazine but her eyes are trained on Eddie’s face, flicking down to his pristine white cast and up again, blowing bubble after bubble. Eddie stares back for a moment, before glancing away, smile faltering as the uncomfortable awkwardness weakens his fresh air-induced joy. He’ll have to go back home, soon, and then who knows when he’ll be allowed back out again - or _if_ he’ll be allowed back out again, and oh, fuck, what if his mom decides to homeschool him in high school? What if he literally never sees the light of day again?

“No friends, huh?”

Eddie starts at the sound of Gretta’s voice, turning to find her suddenly standing at the counter, much closer than before. She’s leaning toward him, elbows propped on the countertop, magazine lying open and forgotten to her right. “I have friends,” he mumbles, “I just didn’t want it to get dirty.”

Gretta blows another bubble, and then leans to her left toward the pen cup pushed off to one side. “Don’t worry,” she says as she fishes a black Sharpie out of the cup. “I’ll sign it for ya.” She uncaps the marker with her teeth and Eddie looks up to the ceiling, ignoring the odd sensation of the cast vibrating around his arm and the loud clatter the pen cap makes when she spits it out across the counter. “So which one are you getting refilled?”

“M-my - my antibiotics. For my arm.”

“Oh, so the real one?”

“What?”

She’s grinning - a feral, unsettling thing - when Eddie meets her eyes again. “The _real_ one,” she repeats. “Not one of the placebos.”

“What’s ‘placebo’ mean?”

“It means bullshit. They’re not real, dude. None of the shit you take is real.”

“That’s not true,” Eddie says, acutely aware of the fact that his fingers have gone numb. “That’s not true, that’s - I needed - I _need_ them, I’m, I’m sick -”

“You’re not, though,” she says flippantly, attention now back on his cast. She continues writing as she blows another bubble. “They’re all sugar pills, except the antibiotics you started taking for this,” she taps the end of her Sharpie against his cast twice. “Even your inhaler is fake. Just water and camphor.”

He has no reason to believe Gretta Keene, of all people. He still remembers quite vividly all the vile things she said to Beverly about him and about Beverly herself. Every single part of him should dismiss her claims with little more than a scoff.

And yet…

“Here you go, Eddie,” Mr. Keene calls from just beyond the corner, and Gretta quickly shoves Eddie’s arm off the counter and dives back toward the chair she was sitting in before. Mr. Keene hands him his prescription bag and smiles down at him kindly, and Eddie does his best to smile back with his heart firmly lodged in his throat. He totters back down the aisle without saying thank you and trips through the front door and out into bright sunlight, gasping and squinting as his eyes struggle to adjust.

What was it Stan said when they were ten? _You healed your own asthma_ , or something like that? _You’ll never need to go to the doctor again?_

“I _never needed_ the fucking doctor,” Eddie whispers to himself. He glances down at the prescription bag in his hand and catches sight of the writing on his cast. Gretta has written _LOSER_ in neat, clearly legible writing.

White-hot rage floods his veins; with a vicious snarl, Eddie turns on his heel and takes off at a dead sprint down Main Street. He makes it all the way to the corner before colliding head-first with someone _else_ running full speed in the opposite direction.

The collision sends them both sprawling out across the sidewalk, and Eddie groans at the dull pain rolling down his spine. He can hear the other person gasping for air somewhere beside him; Eddie sits up quickly, insults rising like dammed water behind his teeth, ready to eviscerate whatever idiot just got in his way.

Whatever he’s expecting to see, it certainly isn’t the sight before him. Beverly looks very much like a kicked puppy struggling to her feet, eyes wild and glazed in a way that immediately raises the hair on the back of Eddie’s neck. She’s bruised up and bleeding profusely, her clothes ripped and tattered on her body, and when she looks at Eddie, he sees absolutely no recognition in her face. She’s still struggling to get to her feet but she’s stumbling, staggering, like she’s got some deeper injury slowing her down.

Like a wild, hunted animal.

“Bev?” Eddie scrambles to his feet and reaches out to steady her, blinking rapidly as the faintest signs of recognition spark in her eyes. “Bev, hey, what’s happening? What’s wrong?”

“Eddie,” she pants, tangling her long fingers in his shirt and fisting the material tightly, yanking them both closer together. “I’m - it’s - m-my dad -”

He hears a distant roar from the direction she came from and peers over her shoulder in time to catch sight of a tall, muscular man whose nose looks just like Beverly’s charging toward them, face red and eyes flashing with sheer _murder_ . He has the wherewithal to understand that _he_ did this to her - that she was running from _him_ when they ran into each other - that this man absolutely _cannot_ lay a hand on her again.

“C’mon,” Eddie pulls Beverly forward urgently and rushes toward the nearest alley, refusing to balk when he recognizes the trash can upon which Ben leaned after Eddie saved him back at the start of this god-forsaken summer. “C’mere, get behind me.”

Beverly scrambles to do as he says, letting out a whimper he’s fairly certain isn’t voluntary as she grips his shoulders and crouches down behind him. Heavy footsteps grow louder and louder outside the alley, and Eddie bends his knees, dropping into a defensive crouch just before Alvin Marsh appears at the mouth of the alley.

He pauses at the sight of Beverly cowering behind Eddie, and laughs at Eddie’s posture. “Step away from my daughter right now and I might consider leaving you alive, boy,” he murmurs leisurely as he slowly steps inside the alley.

“Leave her alone,” Eddie says calmly.

“I _said_ step _away_.”

“ _No_.”

Alvin’s lecherous grin melts into a snarl, his dark eyes flicking from Eddie’s to something over Eddie’s shoulder. “You let this boy touch you, Bevvy?” he asks, pointing a trembling finger at Eddie, and Eddie zeroes in automatically on the bloody bruises splitting the skin over his knuckles on that hand. “You let him take your virtue?”

“N- _no_ , daddy,” Beverly whines into Eddie’s shoulder. “No, he didn’t - _we_ didn’t -”

Alvin lunges forward and Eddie meets him halfway, dodging his messy right hook with ease and landing a satisfying hit against his cheekbone in one smooth movement. Alvin hits the ground with a pained grunt and Eddie skids to a stop, not pausing as he quickly leaps over Alvin’s prone figure to stand between him and Beverly once more. He watches closely as Alving struggles back to his feet, eyes flashing dangerously as he massages his bruised jaw. “I’m gonna make you regret _looking_ at my baby,” he growls.

“ _Stop it_!” Beverly sobs as she grips Eddie’s shoulders hard, “ _Please, daddy, stop it_ -”

Alvin roars and rushes forward and Eddie shoots toward him with so much force his feet barely touch the ground, catching him hard around his pudgy middle and bodily slamming him into the ground several feet back. Alvin’s head bounces on the concrete with a sickening _thud_ but he manages to find a solid grip on Eddie’s shirt, clawing and yanking as hard as he can. Eddie rears up and punches Alvin in the face again and again and again, until Alvin’s grip on his shirt loosens and each cough and gasp for air sprays blood between his teeth. Eddie rolls off of him and immediately darts back to Beverly, arms raised to shield her as Alvin groans and slowly rolls to one side.

He does not seem to be in a rush to move any time soon, so Eddie quickly rounds on Beverly and gently pushes her back enough to get a good look at her, head to toe. “ _Shit_ , Bev,” he breathes, wincing at the pouring tears catching in the open gashes on her face.

She shakes her head and scrambles forward until her arms cinch tight around his waist and her forehead presses against his collarbone, her entire body trembling with the force of her sobs. Eddie gently runs his fingers through her tangled hair, lips flattened together in a thin line and gaze upturned toward the narrow shaft of sky visible between buildings as pure hatred for Alvin Marsh and tender concern for Beverly collide in a dizzying kaleidoscope in his mind.

His only warning is the odd sound of something thin whistling through the air before sharp pain explodes at an angle across his shoulders and down his back, sending him lurching forward hard enough that Beverly sprawls out on the ground before him. He collapses to his hands and knees, unable to draw a breath as the pain erupts again and again. Beverly’s screaming and the world is imploding and the leper knows his name and his pills are all placebos and his mother has been _lying to him_ and _nothing makes any goddamn sense_ -

He hears the loud sound of thick glass shattering followed quickly by that of a heavy body collapsing boneless to the ground, and the pain in his back fizzles and eases into something muted and manageable. Eddie pushes himself up and cranes around to find Alvin knocked completely unconscious, bleeding heavily from his head, with Beverly standing over him. She’s holding something heavy and porcelain and jagged on one end in her hands, still crying but no longer sobbing; she casts the thing aside and scrambles over her father’s splayed legs toward Eddie.

“Holy fucking shit,” Eddie grits, hissing at the sharp, jerking protest in his muscles as he struggles to push himself up to his knees. “What was that?”

“Toilet lid, I think.”

He grimaces. “What the fuck was he hitting me with?”

“Pipe,” Beverly mutters, pointing to the hollow pipe still clutched in Alvin’s hand. “Can you sit up?”

“Yeah, yeah, just -” he manages to roll his hips and settle on his butt there in the alley, letting out a continuous, quiet groan until the pain recedes enough for him to breathe in steadily through his nose. “Did he do all this to you?”

Beverly grimaces and nods. “I knew today was gonna be bad,” she says. “It’s the three-year anniversary of - of the day my mom left.”

“Shit,” Eddie touches her knee and she flashes him a small, grateful smile. “Fuck, Bev, I’m so sorry. My dad died when I was five, which isn’t really the same thing, but - I get it, sort of.”

“It’s close enough,” she says, her smile laced with sadness.

“Here,” he reaches for her arm but pauses before touching her, waiting until she meets his eyes. “I’ll heal you.”

“You should heal yourself first,” she says apprehensively. “He hit you _really_ hard -”

“I’m not that bad, I can wait. You’re the one who’s bleeding.”

She hesitates a moment longer before extending her arm, smiling when Eddie gently squeezes before leaning forward and honing his attention on her injuries. The breeze races down his arms and rushes over her skin, and an alarmingly bright golden light bursts forth through her clothes. She gasps and shivers and rocks forward to catch him when he slowly tips to his right. “Here we go,” she grunts, guiding him back to lean the bulk of his weight against the alley wall. “You okay? You still with me?”

He opens his mouth to respond, but Beverly’s no longer crouching down beside him; she’s flying through the air and slamming into the far wall with a sickening crunch, she’s collapsing to the ground in a motionless heap, she’s blocked from his vision by someone wearing baggy, silvery pants -

A familiar gloved hand closes over his throat and lifts him up off the ground. Eddie has just enough time to process the glowing yellow eyes gleefully glittering up at him before he’s hefted away from the wall and slammed back against it.

It all goes dark after that.

* * *

Had anyone bothered asking way back at the beginning of summer, Richie would have said his sole plan for the break was to plant himself in the sticky arcade carpet and beat the absolute shit out of Street Fighter every single day until September. No wandering through creepy crackhead houses, no pubescent search parties through the woods, no unhinged child-eating demons haunting his dreams.

And _definitely_ no screaming matches with his best friend in the middle of the street that end with a swift punch in the mouth.

The memory of Bill’s face contorted with rage still makes Richie feel a little bit nauseous when he thinks about it too hard. It sucks all the worse because Richie knew the _second_ the words left his lips he’d regret them for the rest of his life, but - but, _fuck_ , he regrets half the shit he says out loud on a good day, it’s not like he’s _known_ for his spectacular ability for forethought.

He clenches his jaw at the thought and punches the worn button on Street Fighter’s console a little harder, trying to find the surge of pleasure he used to get at the sound of his opponent’s digital groaning and coming up empty.

His opponent goes down after a moment and Richie automatically glances to his right, eyes falling over the empty space beside him where a co-player normally stands.

Loneliness compacts a little harder around his heart; he grits his teeth and slots another coin into the machine, shoulders tensed for another round.

The lingering silence from Ben, Mike, and Beverly hangs like water-logged curtains over Richie’s awareness, a constant pressure in the back of his mind. Beverly - well, he liked Beverly well enough after Eddie brought her into the group, she’s a pretty swell guy all things considered, but he’d be stupid not to know her loyalty lies unfailingly with Bill; he’d seen the broken-hearted look in her eyes that afternoon outside of Stan’s house after Ben dragged Bill away from him. Her subsequent abandonment did not shock him, not really, but it _did_ hurt. The _shock_ came from both Ben and Mike’s abandonments - they had _agreed_ with him before shit really hit the fan, for Christ’s sake. They had backed him up and yelled with him until their voices cracked, and Ben had even found the nuts to disagree with Beverly _to her face_ , which he didn't even think Ben was capable of. But it’s been three long weeks and Richie hasn’t seen or heard a peep from either one of them, and some dark slithering _something_ inside him keeps playing the appalled, almost disgusted looks on their faces after Richie screamed _Georgie’s dead!_ and pressing rewind, over and over and over again. _You shouldn’t be surprised_ , it tells him uncaringly. _They were only ever tolerating you_.

Even Stan seems distant - still around, thank _god_ , but somehow irreparably changed. Whatever flicker of hope winked to life in the wake of his _shockingly_ amazing Bar Mitzvah was subsequently extinguished in the hours after, when Stan received him with a weak, shaking smile and resolutely refused to discuss anything other than the different bird species he’s seen since they last saw each other.

He wouldn’t even talk about Eddie.

Richie’s not sure he can name the sharp, violent feeling that wells up in his chest when he thinks about Eddie. Every silence rings with his broken, terrified screams, every shadow morphs into his sweaty, petrified face. Richie has thrown up three separate times over the course of the last month just from memory alone.

It’s isn’t fair, the pit he gets deep in his belly every time he thinks about Eddie. It’s not the same pit as the ones left by the others - their neglect and abandonment is all their own choice, but he knows Sonia Kaspbrak well enough to know that Eddie doesn’t really have another choice. Richie knows this, and yet - and yet. He’d held Eddie’s little face between his hands and tried, tried _so desperately hard_ to protect him, and he just wasn’t enough; Sonia swallowed him up right before his eyes and he’d been powerless to stop her. He’d seen the way she yanked on the nape of Eddie’s neck, the force with which she threw him in the car. The performity of her wailing crocodile tears combined with the sheer futility of everything he’s done to protect Eddie leading up to that moment invoked a rage so blinding it tore through him like a wildfire, rendering him paralyzed and powerless, a mere spectator, until Bill as good as goaded it out of him.

It’s really not goddamn fair that he’s been the _only one_ even _remotely_ concerned with protecting Eddie - including Eddie himself - and he got punched in the fucking mouth for it.

This summer has been, in a word, _really fucking shitty._

( _That’s_ three words _, Rich, how are you on honor roll and I’m not?_ A familiar snippy voice scoffs in his head.)

 _Beep beep, asshole_ , he snarks back.

Street Fighter doesn’t have the same alluring draw as it did way back at the beginning of the summer, but Richie hogs the machine all the same, ignoring the quiet snickers and the lingering gazes that burn against the back of his neck. No one vies to play with him - no one outside his little circle of friends ever does - but even if they _did_ he’s fairly certain he’d probably scream or cry or punch them in the face or maybe a horrifying combination of all three. He glares down at his virtual opponent’s pixelated face and watches it change to Bill’s in his mind’s eye. He slams his fist against the _punch_ button as hard as he can.

“Richie!”

He whirls around toward the front door at the sound of his name and freezes; Bill Fucking Denbrough is _here,_ he’s _in the arcade,_ he’s rushing toward Richie with an unfamiliar look on his face and Richie’s character is being pummeled.

“What do _you_ want?” he snarls, slamming his fist against the _punch_ button rapidly and grinning a bit sadistically at the electronic sounds of his opponent taking a beating. “See that guy I’m hitting? I’m pretending it’s _you._ ”

“R-Richie,” Bill says - breathless, like he’s been running. “I-it - i-i-i-it got B-B-Bev and E-Eh-Eh-Eddie.”

Richie scoffs, eyes still trained on the screen. “What the fuck’re you even talking about?”

“I-I- _It_ , Richie. I- _It_ got Bev and Eh-Eddie.”

Richie freezes, staring without seeing as his opponent begins beating his character to a pulp. He can feel the ice crystalizing his joints. “What’re you talking about, Bill?” he repeats in a near-whisper.

“Look,” Bill hands him a wrinkled white paper bag, contents rattling as it shifts from hand to hand; Richie squints down at the name on the label, _E. KASPBRAK_ , and shudders as his blood runs cold. “I w-was supposed to m-m-muh-heet Bev, b-but - s-s-s-something m-must have h-hah-happened, th-the apartment w-was a w-w-wr-wreck and th-there was b-b-bluh-hud everywhere, and n-n-nay-neighbors s-said her d-d-dad was b-b-buh-heating her and ch-chased h-her down the s-s-street, s-so I w-w-went the w-way they s-s-said they s-saw them g-g-go and e-e-eventually I f-f-fuh-hound that on the g-ground down the s-s-s-street from Kuh-Keene’s, r-right in front of that a-a-alley where we m-m-m-met Ben on the l-l-last day of s-school. I also f-f-found Bev’s d-dad all b-b-buh-heaten up and kn-knocked out c-cold in that alley.”

“That doesn’t mean _It_ took them,” Richie says quietly, desperately clutching the bag closer to his chest. “Maybe - maybe they ran into each other and Eddie protected her from her dad and now they’re just hiding -”

“Th-there was m-m-more,” Bill interrupts, “there was r-ruh-writing on the w-wall, in - in b-b- _blood_. ‘ _They die if you try._ ’”

“How do we know it’s real?” Richie chokes. “How do we know this isn’t like the letterman jacket or the doors upstairs in that fucking house?”

“N-n-no one’s s-seen Bev since her d-d-dad chased her out of the a-a-apartment earlier, and I asked M-Mr. Keene - he s-said Eh-Eddie came in to g-get a r-r-r-refill on his p-prescription and l-l-luh-heft, but I know he n-n-never made it back h-h-home. His m-m-mom called Mrs. Uris to s-s-see if he w-went to Stan’s h-h-house, S-S-Stan said so w-wuh-when I c-called him from the p-p-payphone.”

“Fuck. Fuck, fuck, _fuck_ -”

“Y-y-you were r-r-r-right, b-before,” mumbles Bill, “about - about g-g-getting the r-r-rest of us k-k-k-kuh-hilled. Th-this is m-m- _my_ fault, R-R-Richie. I n-n-never - I n- _never_ wanted anyone eh-else to get h-h-hurt, _especially_ not Eddie or B-B-Buh-hev, but th-this is a-a- _all_ my f-fault, and I’m s-so sorry. I’ll do w-w-whatever it t-takes to get them b-back - _both_ of th-them. I s-s-swear.”

Richie swallows thickly, pushing down his rising panic long enough to process the unfamiliar look on Bill’s face as that of _guilt_ , gnawing bone-deep but still so plainly, painfully visible in his eyes. “We have to go back, don’t we?” Richie whispers around the painful knot in his throat. “Back to the fucking Well House.”

Bill nods grimly. “I saw the w-w-well down in the b-b-bay-basement that d-duh-hay,” he says. “I th-th-think It t-took them d-down into the s-s-sewers. I _know_ w-we can g-g-get them b-back, but - it h-h- _has_ to be a-all of us. So...are you w-with me?”

“No fucking shit I’m with you,” he says hoarsely, “of _course_ I’m with you.”

He does not add the _for Eddie_ that is bouncing around his skull, nor does he mirror Bill’s tight, determined smile; he follows Bill through the arcade’s front door and shoves down the mental image of wide, frightened doe eyes blinking up at him from a rotting kitchen floor.

Ben, Mike, and Stan are waiting for them, milling on the sidewalk as Stan rummages through his backpack just beyond the Well House’s front yard when Bill and Richie come speeding down Neibolt Street. They all look scared, even Mike with an unfamiliar bolt gun slung over his shoulder, but only Ben seems to share a fraction of Richie’s distress - it’s in the panicked gleam in his eyes, the painful twist of his fingers knotted together over his belly. “W-we go down t-t-together,” says Bill, “and we s- _stay_ together, no matter w-w-w-what.”

Silver falls with a clatter on the asphalt behind him, and the rest of their bikes follow suit.

The house is as rank and disgusting as Richie remembers, but he hardly spares a glance around - Bill moves confidently through the darkened sitting room, toward the hallway just past the staircase that leads toward that accursed kitchen. Richie stays close to Bill’s right, casting glances over his shoulder every few feet to ensure the other three are still with them, only pausing when Bill throws out an arm. “W-watch for s-s-spluh-hinters,” he murmurs as he takes his first tentative step down.

The wood creaks and groans beneath his weight, but holds steady enough. Richie eases himself down after Bill and bites the inside of his cheek to keep from gasping at the rickety sway, the foreboding give that only intensifies as he nears the unanchored middle of the staircase. He hears Stan’s quiet, uncomfortable hum just behind him, and Mike and Ben’s shifting feet at the top of the staircase, but his eyes remain trained on the back of Bill’s head at the base of the stairs.

Bill claps Richie’s shoulder when Richie’s feet hit solid ground, and Richie quickly shuffles out of the way as Stan rushes down the last three steps. Mike’s already on the stairs and is murmuring quiet words of encouragement to a petrified Ben, but Richie hardly hears them. _Please don't be down there, Eddie_ , he thinks as he slowly approaches the well’s ruins and the plunging darkness within. _But if you are down there, please be okay._

“Careful,” Stan warns softly. He’s peering at the well over Richie’s shoulder when Richie glances back. “Be careful.”

Richie can sense an unspoken significance in the cadence of Stan’s speech, but Richie is so far beyond caring enough to try parsing it out. Bill gently shoulders between them, a coil of rope looped around one shoulder. “W-watch out,” he says, and Richie shuffles backwards automatically.

Bill climbs up on the side of the well, steadied by Ben’s hands on his ankles, and loops the rope around an empty pulley dangling over the depth of blackness. Mike pulls the slack through and secures it to a thick support beam nearby as Bill feeds the other end of the rope down into the well. “W-w-we’ll go down wuh-one at a t-t-t-time,” he says, taking Ben’s offered hand and stepping back down into the basement as Mike straightens up and nods. Bill yanks on his end of the rope, tightening the slack, and then yanks twice more for good measure. “I’ll go f-first,” he says grimly.

He swings a leg over the side of the well, grips the rope with both hands, flashes them one last tight grimace-smile, and carefully eases his other leg off the side of the well. Richie holds his breath for one endless second as Bill swings from one side of the well to the other and the pulley groans beneath his full weight, but he manages to steady himself with his feet planted against the side of the well, and the pulley holds. Richie releases his breath as Bill slowly walks himself down into the shadowy depths of the well.

“Th-there’s an opening r-ruh-right here!” he calls after a long moment of scuffling footsteps. “It sh-should - yeah, it l-l-leads right into the s-s-sewers. This is it!”

A shaft of light flares to life about ten feet deep inside the well and spins dizzily, shining first down further into the depths, and then up at the four boys craning over the edge of the well.

Richie climbs down next, valiantly ignoring the swoop of fear in his gut when he briefly considers the impossible depth of darkness unfurling beneath him. He breathes through his nose and glares at the stones beneath his feet, until he feels Bill’s hands on his arm, pulling him to one side, steadying the rope as he carefully dismounts and crawls further into the opening.

The smell is already rancid; Richie presses his fist against his lips to keep from retching as Bill leans back out through the opening to watch the next descent. Through the shadows, Richie can see where the rocky tunnel transitions to a dingy, mottled metal ten yards from where they’re crouched. He swallows hard and squints through the darkness, straining to hear anything around the muffled sounds of feet scraping against stone behind him.

Stan joins them next, pale as a ghost but otherwise looking relatively steady. He lets Richie pull him to the side and peers around him to get a look at the tunnel, briefly struggling to free a flashlight from his backpack before flipping it on, reaching back into his bag, and handing Richie a second flashlight.

“How are we gonna find them?” he asks quietly. “How’re we gonna get back here?”

“We’re gonna find them,” Richie says firmly. “And Eddie’s gonna get us out. He’s a human compass, remember? He’s always been able to find us when we get lost in the Barrens, and he’s _always_ been able to get us back home. Once we find him, he’ll get us out.”

Stan appears to be on the verge of arguing, but Richie supposes something in his own expression must stop him; he stares for a long moment, lips parted, before swallowing thickly and nodding. “Dollars to donuts,” he mumbles, smiling weakly.

Richie nods, unable to stop a brief, pained grin at his own words from years previously parroted back at him. “Dollars to donuts, Spaghetti Man’ll get us out,” he agrees.

Ben clambers into the opening, and a few moments later Mike follows, and then Bill clambers past all of them and crawls through the tunnel. “Stay close and stay together,” he mutters over his shoulder.

The tunnel opens up as it drops into a wider sewage pipe, thick greywater sloshing all the way up to their knees. Richie can only spare it a momentary thought; he’s pretty certain being dragged involuntarily through greywater is the only way to fully unleash Eddie’s capability for cold-blooded, thoughtless murder, so It might already be long dead before they catch up. He can perfectly picture the disgruntled outrage furrowing Eddie’s expressive brows; it’s a small, flickering comfort.

Minutes pass without a word, sloshing footsteps amplified by the curved walls and the unearthly silence. Each step forward solidifies the weight in Richie’s chest, intensifies the desperate, wild fear festering in the pit of his belly; he pulls the neck of his shirt up over his nose and mouth and tries to breathe, tears springing up in his eyes at the bitter rancid air rolling over his tongue.

“Wait, stop.”

Mike’s voice rings out sharply after they turn their third corner. Richie freezes, staring back at Mike as the others pause in his periphery. The water sloshing around their legs quiets after a moment, but he can still hear it splashing in the distance, somewhere beyond the last corner in the direction they came from. “What is that?” Stan whispers.

“We need to _move_ ,” Richie chokes, taking off at an awkward half-jog down the tunnel. He can hear the others thrashing along behind him, Ben’s breathing sharp and ragged, echoing loud and distorted down the tunnel.

The tunnel twists first left, and then right, and then up ahead Richie can see a wide opening lined with other tunnels branching off in all directions. He races toward it, following the natural downward slope and skidding through greywater and stumbling into the opening.

The ceiling towers ten feet over his head and a mound of rotting earth piles up at one opening; a grate over their heads spills bright afternoon sunlight through the room, casting the whole place in an oddly comforting golden glow. Richie’s automatically drawn to the opening that catches a ray of sunshine on its right wall; he hurries toward it, not bothering to look back, knowing the others will be on his heels.

He feels Stan clutch at the back of his shirt as they race into darkness once more. Bill accidentally whacks him in the hip with his extinguished flashlight as he races past, staggering to a halt three feet away. Richie reaches back with one hand and grips Stan’s wrist tightly, and reaches forward with his other hand to touch both Ben and Mike as they pass.

They wait in silence, each of them trying desperately to calm their loud panting, straining to hear without being heard.

The splashing picks up again after a long moment, and the voices quickly follow.

“- this way,” a gruff, familiar voice grunts, and Richie squeezes his eyes shut. Of _course_ Bowers followed them into the sewers. “C’mon, they gotta be right through here.”

“This seems like a bad idea,” says Victor Criss. “Why can’t we just wait for them outside the house?”

“ _Shut up_ ,” Bowers snarls. “I have to - I have to kill them.”

“ _Kill them_?” Victor repeats shrilly. “Henry -”

“ _Shut the fuck up_!”

“What’s that?” Belch Huggins asks quietly.

The splashing in the opening goes quiet. “What’s what?”

“ _That_.”

Richie holds his breath. The water splashes erratically out in the opening. Victor gasps.

“Oh _fuck_ -”

A heavy blow. A deep, loud crack. “Oh, Jesus Christ, not - not _Frankenstein_!”

A loud, haunting moan. Another heavy blow and a loud, wet gurgle. A keening, hair-raising giggle. Beside him, Stan lets out a shallow, trembling breath. It all goes quiet.

“C’mon,” Bill whispers.

Stan’s wrist wriggles in Richie’s grip, but his fingers catch at Richie’s palm before Richie can fully pull his hand away; Stan grips his hand tightly and Richie squeezes back, quickly banishing dozens of memories of Eddie holding Stan’s hand like this that swim to the forefront of his mind.

They make it another four turns before Bill suddenly freezes ahead of them, flashlight skimming over the length of the pipe. Mike approaches him slowly, reaching with a tentative hand toward Bill’s shoulder as Bill’s breathing goes rapid and erratic. “Bill?”

“Georgie,” Bill breathes.

It’s all the warning they get before Bill takes off, splashing greywater back at them as he sprints down the tunnel. Richie coughs and sputters but does not release Stan’s hand; Bill has vanished by the time he manages to scrub the greywater out of his eyes.

“Bill!” Mike shouts, clambering down the tunnel after him, shooting desperate looks at Ben, Richie, and Stan over his shoulder. They hurry to catch up with him, slipping and sliding through the muck as Mike leads the charge.

“ _Bill_!” Richie screams, focusing on Stan’s tight grip cutting off circulation to his fingers to fight the red tinge of rage swimming at the edges of his vision.

“We have to be quiet!” Stan hisses. “It’ll _hear us_ -”

“It already knows we’re here,” Mike says grimly, and Richie tries not to shiver at the way the statement hits him like an absolute, universal truth. “Can’t you feel It?”

Stan shudders, his grip on Richie’s hand tightening further. They continue rushing down the pipe, shouting Bill’s name and shining their flashlights down each pipe that branches off into darkness along the sides of their tunnel. Instinctively, Richie knows Bill won’t be there; he can feel it as certainly as he knows his own name.

The tunnel begins another gradual downward slope, gradually widening out as a faint light up ahead grows steadily brighter and brighter. The low-simmering panic in his mind focuses to a razor-sharp hum buzzing against his skull like bees trapped in a jar.

The tunnel takes one last looping curve to the left, and up ahead, Richie can see a broad opening not unlike the one they ran through earlier. _There_ , a voice says in his mind.

The stench of raw sewage reaches a fever pitch as Richie clambers down the two-foot drop at the end of the run-off pipe and finally drops Stan’s hand. He pauses and retches at the mouth of the pipe, eyes screwed shut and hands braced on his knees. He sees a flash of light through his eyelids and feels a steadying hand press between his shoulder blades; he opens his eyes to the sight of Stan’s shoes shuffling beside his, laces tied in perfect bows in spite of the greywater shit staining them dark. “It’s alright,” Stan mumbles, sounding seconds away from retching himself. “C’mon, keep moving.”

“Bill!” Mike shouts, and his voice echoes back loud and distorted in the cavernous room. Richie straightens up slowly, wincing at the sharp protests in his lower back, trailing along behind Stan and casting his flashlight around a bit listlessly. “ _Bill, where are you_?”

“Holy shit,” Stan murmurs.

The roof towers up twenty, thirty feet over their heads, lit by the same grate as the last opening, but the sunlight that pours through catches on an impossible mountain of - of _stuff_. Richie casts his light up, up, up, jaw dropping in spite of the disgusting stench at the sheer impossibility of the sight before him.

“Oh, god,” Stan chokes, “are those - are _those_ -”

Richie shines his flashlight up and balks - up at the top of the mountain, just below the grate, he can see bodies _floating_. Bodies and bodies and bodies, some partially decomposed, some missing limbs, all of them still and motionless and slowly orbiting the top of the mountain -

“The missing kids,” Mike whispers, and Richie almost pukes.

“ _Guys_!” Ben shouts sharply.

Richie turns on his heel and is immediately met by the sight of _Beverly_ , face pale and smudged with dirt and illuminated by the sunlight over their heads and Ben’s flashlight from below. She’s floating, too, six feet off the ground and just out of reach; aside from a few scrapes and bruises and the fact that she’s _literally floating_ , she appears unharmed. Richie’s fingertip barely brushes against the bottom of her boot as he takes a running leap toward her.

“Here,” Mike grunts as he hefts Stan up with a grip around his thighs; Stan grabs Beverly by the ankles and pulls, and she floats down slowly, still unmoving even as her feet touch the ground. Ben and Mike help Stan lay her down on her back, Ben carefully supporting her head between his hands.

“ _Fuck_ ,” Richie gasps.

Her eyes are wide open and cast over in a thick, milky film. Ben shuffles to her side on his knees, hands drifting from the back of her head to her shoulders; he shakes her a few times, a choked sob bubbling past his lips when Beverly remains perfectly still. “What’s wrong with her?” he asks, casting a desperate glance up at Mike. “Why isn’t she waking up?”

“It got her.”

Richie almost topples over at the sound of Bill’s ragged voice. Bill looks significantly paler than the last time Richie saw him, chin quivering and chest heaving, but eyes shining with a steely determination. “What do you mean?” Ben asks. “Is she - is she -” He presses two fingers to her throat and lets out a quiet, strangled whine. “I can feel her heartbeat,” Ben says hoarsely, “but it’s too slow - _it’s too slow_!”

“We have to wake her up before It comes back.”

“We _need_ to find Eddie,” says Richie, trying and failing to ignore the panic mounting in the back of his mind. “He’ll be able to fix her, he’ll be able to heal her, but we have to find him -”

“What if It did the same thing to him -”

“Guys!”

Ben is leaning over Beverly now, hands braced on either side of her head - lips sealed over hers. Suddenly, the panic quiets down; Richie watches in shocked, rapt silence as Ben kisses Beverly, his fingers curling against the rough ground beneath her head.

A short eternity passes, and then Ben yanks back, and Beverly’s lurches upward, coughing hard, blinking the milky whiteness out of her eyes until only familiar blue remains. Her chest heaves with a rattling gasp as she slowly registers the sight before her.

“J-January embers,” she chokes, eyes glued to Ben’s face.

A small, relieved smile twitches in the apples of Ben’s cheeks. “My heart burns there, too,” he pants.

Beverly lets out a quiet, coughing laugh, a trembling hand rising to press at the base of her throat. “You found me.”

Something is cracked wide-open at the center of his chest, something raw and animalistic and so, _so_ desperate. “Bev,” Richie croaks, and her gaze immediately darts to his face. “Where’s Eddie?”

She blinks, her smile quickly fading. Her eyes drift over his shoulder and she clumsily scrambles to her feet. “He was -” she stays, pointing to the left of the mountain. “Oh god,” she chokes, “he was right there, but - so was _It_.”

Richie swallows another retch and hurries toward the spot, casting his flashlight up toward the ceiling desperately. He feels Stan fumble past him, hears the others approaching from behind, watches the beams from their flashlights spin and cross over his like spotlights shining up toward the clouds.

“There!” Beverly says, pointing across Richie; he adjusts the angle of his flashlight to follow her finger and gasps at the sight it illuminates.

Eddie is hanging motionless in the air ten feet over their head, his body just as limp and lifeless as Beverly’s was minutes before. Richie’s heart lurches up into his throat at the sight, and he can’t stop the high, keening whine that escapes his chest as the surreality of the moment crashes into him. He looks beaten half-way to hell even from here, blood dripping steadily down the side of his face, his cast dingy from sewer water, _LOSER_ scrawled in black like a sinister brand. He can’t see it from this angle, but he knows Eddie’s eyes are open and whited out like Beverly’s were; he can’t quite stop the quiet, choked sob that bubbles up his throat.

“How’re we supposed to get him down from there?” he hears Ben ask. “There’s no way we’ll be able to reach him.”

Richie stares a moment longer, and then turns to quickly survey the mountain. It doesn’t look particularly stable, but based on the gravity-defying curve up near the grate on the ceiling and the _floating bodies_ that orbit it, he’d venture to guess regular physics probably won’t apply. He shoves his flashlight into Beverly’s hands and darts toward the base of the mountain.

“Richie, _no_!” Stan shouts, but Richie ignores him, plunging both hands deep into the pile and hefting himself up off the ground. He can hear the others clamoring behind him, their shouts melding together in an incomprehensible wall of noise that only serves to propel him higher.

He makes it up another three feet before his grip fails and he falls backwards, landing on his back hard enough to knock the breath from his lungs. He gasps and stares up at the bottom of Eddie’s shoes, batting his hands blindly when the others try to crowd around him. “Get off me,” he grunts, struggling to sit up. “Get _off me_ -”

A high-pitched snicker echoes from beyond the mountain, and Richie scrambles backwards, grabbing at the hand that reaches down to grip his shirt over his shoulder. “What’sa matter, Richie?” the voice asks as the hand on his shirt pulls him up to his feet.

“Let him go,” Richie spits, ignoring Stan’s chest quaking beneath his left arm and Beverly’s impossible grip around his right, glaring viciously at empty air.

It laughs again - oily and taunting. “You won’t be enough,” It says, and Richie clenches his jaw. “You’ll _never_ be enough.”

“Sh-show yourself, you c-c- _coward_!” Bill shouts.

The word echoes back at them - _coward, coward_ \- and then Richie spots movement just beyond the base of the mountain.

“Billy?” a quiet, timid voice calls, and Bill goes rigid.

Georgie shuffles into the light slowly, sunlight casting his pale skin into dizzying relief. Blood stains the tattered sleeve of his sweater black, torn up near his shoulder; his entire right arm is missing, ripped from his body. Bill sucks in a shuddering gasp as Georgie slowly, slowly moves toward them.

“Billy,” Georgie says again, voice warbling with unshed tears. “What took you so long?”

Bill sniffles and moves toward Georgie slowly, his grip tight around the butt of Mike’s gun. “I’m s-sorry,” he whispers.

“I lost the boat,” Georgie mumbles. “It fell down the drain and I couldn’t reach it. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay, Georgie. It was just a boat.”

“I wanna go home,” Georgie whimpers, and Bill shudders on a silent sob. “Take me home, Billy. I miss mom and dad, and I miss _you_. Please, _please_ take me home.”

“I miss you more than anything, Georgie,” Bill whispers. “And I wish I _could_ take you home right now.” He swallows thickly, and Richie holds his breath. “But I _can’t_. Because you’re not Georgie.”

Bill raises the gun slowly and presses the barrel to Georgie’s forehead, right between his eyes. Georgie whimpers, going cross-eyed as he tries to follow the barrel, blinking up at Bill when he can no longer see it. “ _Billy_ ,” he whispers pathetically.

Bill lets out one last shuddering breath before he pulls the trigger and the bolt pierces Georgie’s skull, and Georgie falls heavily to the ground spread-eagled at Bill’s feet. A deafening silence follows.

And then Georgie’s mangled little body begins convulsing, an inhuman groan spilling from his throat. His limbs twitch and stretch, his spine arching unnaturally and skull bouncing off the slick concrete hard enough to crack. Bill staggers backwards, his grip on the gun slipping, and Beverly drops the flashlight to grab Richie’s arm with both hands.

“Kill It, Bill!” Stan shrieks. “Kill It now!”

“ _BILL_!” Richie bellows when Bill remains motionless.

Georgie’s shoes sprout orange puffs, his stained clothes ripple and change, his body shifts and creaks and _grows_ before their eyes. And then Georgie is gone, and Pennywise rises to Its feet like a marionette brought to life, It’s bulbous head rolling unnaturally as Bill scrambles with the gun. “ _Kill It_!” Beverly screams.

“Kill It, Bill, kill It! _Kill It!_ ”

Its head slowly lifts, Its eyes roll into place, Its lips pull into a wretched, crooked grin.

Bill cocks the gun, aims, and fires.

And Pennywise’s forehead caves in.

“The gun wasn’t loaded,” Mike whispers.

Pennywise lurches backwards, spine snapping in half as blood spurts up out of his forehead like a twisted, horrifying fountain. It lets out a terrifying screech, Its body seizing violently, and Bill has just enough time to lift the gun sideways in front of his face before It flies forward and clamps razor-sharp teeth over the metal.

They all spring into action, dizzying and chaotic - Beverly skidding to one side, narrowly dodging Its swinging hands, Mike flying backwards and colliding with the mountain. Bill somehow manages to slam the long side of a thin iron rod into Its mouth and his feet leave the ground - Richie dives forward over Bill’s back to help, their combined weight still not enough to subdue It. He sees flashes of red and yellow, Stan and Ben yanking fruitlessly at Its arms, but It begins spinning faster and faster and both Stan and Ben fall away and vanish into the blurry darkness.

Richie feels a large hand grip the back of his shirt and he’s suddenly airborne, tumbling listlessly and slamming into the ground so hard he sees stars. He hears a scuffle, feels familiar hands pulling him up and away; he blinks and adjusts his crooked but miraculously not cracked glasses and finds himself staring at Pennywise crouching down low to the ground at the base of the mountain, Its gloved hands wrapped tight around Bill’s throat.

“Let him _go_ ,” Beverly cries raggedly behind Richie.

“ _No_ ,” It growls, shaking Its head rapidly. “I’ll _take_ him. I’ll take _all_ of you, and I’ll feast on your flesh and feed on your fear, until there’s _nothing left_ but dust and bones. _Or_ ,” one hand leaves Bill’s throat to wag a finger in the air. “You leave. You leave us be. I’ll take him, _only_ him,” It pets Its hand over Bill’s face, “and you’ll take _him_.” It gestures up to Eddie’s lifeless body, floating on unknowingly over their heads. Richie’s breath catches in his throat. “I’ll have my long rest and you’ll all grow and thrive and live your lives until old age takes you back to the weeds.”

It hisses out the last S, eyes flashing dangerously in the scant light. “ _Leave_ ,” Bill rasps, hands clutching at Its wrist. “T-take Eddie and l-l- _leave_ . I-I’m the one who d-d-dragged you into all th-this. I’m - I’m s-s- _sorry_.”

Richie hears Beverly shift. “ _Guys_ ,” she chokes, “we _can’t_.”

Bill grasps at Its wrist a little tighter, legs shifting restlessly. “ _Go_!” he shouts.

Slowly - slowly - Richie gets to his feet. He can see Eddie’s feet dangling in the topmost edge of his vision. That sharp, violent feeling is back, and now Richie can see it clearly for what it is - love, deep and true, howling and raging and blind. It’s _love_ and it’s so fucking terrifying Richie's sure he's about to hurl his heart and his lungs up right here in the sewers. It's _love_ and it's primitive, nesting right at the center of his brain and scrambling his thoughts around with sharp, needling fingers until only _EddieEddieEddieEddieEddie_ remains. Richie can scarcely wrap his mind around it, or anything other than the overwhelming _desperation_ to take Eddie and _run_ as far as he can from this place and the rage at Bill for putting Eddie there to begin with. “I told you, Bill,” he says unsteadily. “I fucking _told you_. This is _your fault_.” he stops and chokes down the sob welling up in his chest. “You punched me in the face. You made me walk through shitty greywater. You brought me to a fuckin’ _crackhead house,_ and you got Eddie _hurt_. And now?” He shifts closer to the mountain and pulls at the protruding end of a baseball bat, swinging the thick wood around and slamming it solidly against his palm. “Now I’m gonna have to kill this fuckin’ clown.”

It hurls Bill’s body to the side and lunges at Richie, a piercing, inhuman roar ripping through Its throat.

Richie rears back and swings the bat as hard as he can, shouting “ _welcome to the Losers Club, asshole!_ ” as the bat crunches against Its skull.

It staggers backwards and stumbles over the uneven ground, and as It swings around for balance, Beverly drives the end of the iron rod Bill dropped up through the underside of Its jaw. The rod bursts through Its skull and It shrieks, the sound piercing and inhuman and loud enough to make the ground beneath their feet tremble. Richie dives forward on instinct, not even fully comprehending the sight of Eddie falling until his full weight slams into Richie’s chest and shoulder and sends them both sprawling across the ground. “ _Fuck_!” Richie wheezes, gripping hard at Eddie’s sides to keep him from landing fully on the ground despite the throbbing pain in his shoulder.

“ _Wake him up, Richie_!” Stan screams. Richie scrambles out from under Eddie and catches sight of Pennywise thrashing violently and the others gathered around It in a loose circle, each taking turns swiping at It when It turns Its back. “ _Hurry_!”

Eddie’s head lolls lifelessly from one side to the other as Richie quickly tucks his arm beneath his shoulders and lifts his torso up off the ground. He winces at the uncomfortable angle of Eddie’s neck and cradles Eddie’s head in the crook of his arm, stabilizing it with a shaking hand pressed to the exposed side of his face. “Eddie,” he chokes, gently tapping his cheek. Eddie’s eyes are closed. “Eddie, Eds, wake up. _Wake up._ ”

“ _RICHIE!_ ”

“ _C’mon_ , Eds, _please_ , we - we _need you, please_ -”

Pennywise lets out a terrifyingly familiar howl and Richie squeezes his eyes shut, letting the terror overtake him for one breathless moment. The weight of Eddie’s body in his arms grounds him to reality; slowly, Richie exhales through his nose, letting his fingers splay out along the side of Eddie’s face, his thumb gently drag along the swell of his soft, smooth cheek.

“Alright, Sleeping Beauty,” he mutters as his eyes flutter open again. “You had your chance. This one’s on _you_.”

He curls the hand pressed against Eddie’s face under his skull, angling his chin up and craning his own neck down at the same time to press his lips against Eddie’s. It’s stilted and uncomfortable - Eddie’s lips are terrifyingly still and cold - and Richie squeezes his eyes shut, trying desperately not to think about where they are or what’s happening on the other side of his eyelids.

 _Please, Eds,_ he thinks instead. _I need you, I_ love _you, please, please, please. Please come back_.

Eddie’s chest flutters against Richie’s. Richie jerks back, and Eddie heaves in a loud, grating gasp the moment their lips part.

And when his eyes snap open, they glow a bright, fierce gold.

Like a man possessed, Eddie shoots out of Richie’s arms, rocketing high into the air over Pennywise’s head. Distantly, Richie hears the others shouting Eddie’s name, their relief a tangible thing. Pennywise - mid-transformation between the werewolf and what appears to be a mummy - tracks Eddie’s movements through fur and ancient cloth wrappings, a terrifying predator catching first sight of its prey. Its entire body shudders and ripples back into the shape of the clown as Bill frantically motions to the others, pointing toward Richie. They all scurry toward him, giving Pennywise a wide berth, and though Richie reaches for them and pushes them behind him as they approach, his eyes never stray from Eddie where he hovers. “Oh- _ho_ ,” It croaks as It drops down on all-fours. “So you’ve _finally_ come to play with me after _so_ many years.”

Eddie’s snarl deepens. “I’ve come to finish what I started,” he spits in a voice not quite his own, fists igniting with flames so bright Richie feels his retinas burning.

“Such a young plaything,” It softly muses, sharp bones shifting beneath Its silvery jumpsuit as it begins to slowly pace. “So fragile. I expected...more.”

Eddie laughs, sharp and unfamiliar, and Richie’s suddenly struck with the feeling that the person hovering above them is not Eddie. “You cannot possibly _fathom_ the depths of his strength.”

Pennywise snarls, Its glowing yellow eyes darting from Eddie to Richie and Bill and the others clustered behind them. “It brought me a feast,” It says to Eddie.

In the blink of an eye, Eddie shoots down to hover just inches off the floor in front of Richie and Bill, arms raised at his sides to shield them. Richie can feel the heat from the flames burning at the skin of his face. “You’ve consumed your last.” he grits out between his teeth.

The next several seconds pass in a blur - both Eddie and Pennywise move so quickly, twisting and darting and swinging and flying, Richie can only comprehend a twitching mass of silver streaked with red and orange and gold. The grunting and growling raises the hair on the back of Richie’s neck, rips goosebumps down the length of his spine to ripple out across his limbs, and he clutches blindly back at the hands gripping his arm. Pennywise roars, and Eddie shouts, and golden flames erupt in a long, arcing, blinding flash.

Pennywise flies backwards and slams into the raised edge of a drainage pipe near the far edge of the room hard enough that Richie can hear bones snap, and Eddie shoots after It in a streak of gold; his entire body seems to be emitting the light now, broken only where the flames dance against his clenched fists. He arches up in the air high over Pennywise’s prone form, and It only has a moment to weakly raise one hand before Eddie slams both flaming fists against the curve of Its forehead.

The impact is loud enough to crackle against his eardrums, but Richie hardly notices; Its head disintegrates in a cloud of dust beneath Eddie’s fists as It releases one last rattling hiss of a breath, and Eddie pulls himself upright slowly. It gurgles, hands twitching weakly at Its sides, and slowly - under Eddie’s hard, watchful gaze - Its body slides backwards and vanishes down the length of the drainage pipe.

For a long moment, no one moves. Richie pants and blinks tears out of his eyes, unable to recall when he’d stopped breathing or when his vision went blurry. Eddie’s still standing over the drainage pipe, narrow shoulders heaving, fists still clenched.

Bill takes a tentative step toward Eddie before pausing and glancing back uncertainly at Richie. Richie blinks up at him twice before suddenly understanding; together, they move cautiously across the room, Bill waving Beverly off when she moves automatically to follow them.

If Eddie hears them approach, he does not react; Richie bites his lip as Bill slowly, carefully reaches a hand toward Eddie’s left shoulder. “Eh-Eddie?” he whispers as his fingers finally brush against Eddie’s shoulder.

Eddie’s body goes limp almost immediately, collapsing so heavily Bill barely has time to hook his arms beneath Eddie’s armpits before they both go sprawling. “ _Shit_ ,” Richie grunts, diving down to his knees beside Bill. Bill takes Richie’s hand and sits up, carefully pulling Eddie up with him when he automatically sags to one side, arranging his body so that he’s leaning back against his chest. Richie brushes the hair matted to Eddie’s forehead back and away, his touch light as he taps at Eddie’s cheeks once more. “Eds,” he murmurs.

Eddie’s eyelids flutter and twitch. “ _R-Rich_ ,” he breathes, eyes rolling beneath his eyelids, and it’s pure and unadulterated _Eddie_ and it's the best thing Richie’s ever heard in his whole life despite the fact that it immediately morphs into a hoarse groan. “Richie?”

“Yeah, hey,” Richie presses his palm to the side of Eddie’s face just as Eddie’s eyes finally flutter open; he brushes his thumb along Eddie’s cheekbone, and Eddie blinks at him slowly. “You did it, Eds. You killed It. You did so good.” Eddie jerks forward with a quiet, broken hum, arms raised and fingers grasping for purchase on Richie’s sleeves. Richie immediately pulls Eddie in and hugs him tightly. He can feel the groggy smile spreading across Eddie’s face like spilled molasses in the steady swell of his cheek pressed against Richie’s shoulder, and Richie swallows hard against the thick knot of tears in his throat and carefully passes his hand over the back of Eddie’s head. “You did so good, Eddie,” he says again. “ _So_ good.”

“I-I don’t - I don’t remember.”

Richie swallows hard. “That’s okay,” he whispers after a minute. "It's over now. It's gone."

He feels Eddie’s lungs expand beneath his arms as he snuffles out a sigh and nestles in closer, humming hoarsely and grunting in discontentment when Richie lowers his hand from the back of his head. Richie huffs a laugh through his nose and combs his fingers through Eddie’s tangled hair, and Eddie’s head shifts against Richie’s shoulder. “Where’s - where’s Bev?”

“She’s okay.” Richie whispers, wincing when his fingers catch on a particularly gnarled knot at the crown of Eddie’s head. “She’s right over there, she’s okay. Everyone’s okay.”

Eddie hums, leaning a fraction more of his weight into Richie as he reaches backwards blindly. Bill catches his grasping hand, and Eddie smiles again. “Billy?”

“Hey, Eddie,” Bill whispers, sounding seconds away from dissolving into tears himself. “Th-thank you.”

Eddie swallows again, and Richie watches his grip tighten around Bill’s hand. “Guess I ended up being a superhero after all,” he rasps after a moment.

Richie furrows his brow and glances up just as Bill does the same; they stare at each other for a beat, before a muted conversation illuminated by the Denbrough’s flickering television from 3 years earlier suddenly bursts to the forefront of his mind. He can see the moment it hits Bill, too, just a split-second later, and then they’re both laughing and Eddie is grinning and swatting weakly at Richie’s quaking chest.

“W-we tried to t-t-tuh-hell you,” Bill says, playfully nudging Eddie’s shoulder. Eddie grumbles into Richie’s shoulder, fingers squeezing around the loose material of his shirt against his back as Bill slowly stands. “T-take your time,” he murmurs softly.

Richie nods and Bill shuffles over Eddie’s splayed legs, his hand passing briefly over the top of Eddie’s head before he moves out of Richie’s line of sight. Eddie sighs - a quiet, tired thing - and nestles his head closer. “M’tired,” he whines. “I wanna go, I fuckin’ _hate it_ down here. Smells like shit.”

The others are clustered together at the base of the mountain - Richie can only just see them in his periphery when he turns his head - and appear to be in hushed, nervous conversation. He can plainly see both Stan and Beverly craning toward them, as if they’ll somehow be able to angle themselves enough to see Eddie around the stretch of Richie’s shoulders.

He presses his lips together and strokes the back of Eddie’s head one last time before shifting his grip to lean Eddie backwards, away from his chest. “It’s alright,” he says when Eddie whines incoherently in protest. “We’re gonna get outta here right now, okay?”

Eddie frowns. “Rich, I don’t - I don’t think I can walk yet -”

“Who said anything about you walking?”

He opens his mouth to argue but the protest dies on his tongue a moment later, eyes widening in shock as Richie pushes himself up into a crouch and twists, taking Eddie’s arm and draping it over one shoulder. “All aboard the Tozier Express,” he says in his best old-timey Train Conductor Voice, grinning over his shoulder.

Eddie’s clumsy in his movements, like his limbs are numb or his nervous system is flickering offline, but he manages to get situated well enough that he doesn’t immediately topple backwards off of Richie’s back when Richie straightens up. Richie hooks both hands behind Eddie’s knees and shifts him slightly further up his back, grinning when Eddie loosens one arm from just beneath his neck to flick him in the ear. “Thank you, asshole,” Eddie mutters.

Stan, it seems, has lost his battle with self-control; he’s rushing at them with Richie’s first step forward, eyes brimming with tears and fixated on Eddie’s face over Richie’s shoulder. Beverly quickly follows, planting both hands on Richie’s shoulder and leaping up to peck a quick, flying kiss to Eddie’s cheek, and when Eddie laughs Richie can feel it vibrating through his skin.

“Alright, alright,” Richie drawls as both Beverly and Stan pull at Eddie’s hands to hold and squeeze, “let’s get this caravan back on the road, huh? Bill?”

Bill doesn’t respond.

They find him on his knees at the base of the mountain, back turned and shoulders hunched. Richie can only just see the flash of bright yellow clutched in Bill’s hands over his shoulder.

His heart sinks like a stone.

Eddie clambers off of Richie’s back and grips tightly to his arm, urging him forward, eyes trained on Bill. Richie moves slowly, letting Eddie lean most of his weight against him and keeping pace with his pained, hobbling gate.

They sink down at Bill’s sides and Eddie winds both arms around Bill’s neck just as Richie makes out the name _GEORGE DENBROUGH_ written on the tag of the rain slicker clutched between Bill’s hands. Bill squeezes both eyes shut when Richie threads his arm between Eddie’s around his shoulders. “I’m so sorry, Bill,” Richie whispers.

He can feel the others crowding in behind them; the heat of their bodies radiates against his back. Bill dissolves in their arms, and Richie closes his eyes, listening to the steady sounds of Eddie’s breathing only just audible beneath Bill’s echoing sobs.

* * *

Despite the horrendous, lingering ache in his head, the curious gap in his memories, and the lingering uneasiness borne of the hallucinations from which he was unceremoniously yanked, the trip out of the sewers is exceptionally better than the trip in. Eddie feels quite confident in this assessment, even if he has no memory of the trip in.

Richie carries him piggyback, seemingly delighted by the development, and Eddie would be lying if he said he didn’t actually enjoy it a little bit, too. They used to do this all the time when they were younger, play-jousting with Bill and Stan in the elementary school playground or racing across the empty soccer fields at recess. It makes him feel exceptionally young, which is so intrinsically at odds with what they only just endured it actually kind of makes Eddie a little lightheaded.

They lead the charge back out of the sewers, Eddie touting Richie’s flashlight and pointing the way as the others file along behind them. Bill’s still crying, but he’s quieted considerably, and Eddie tries to pretend like he can’t hear Bill compulsively running his hands over the nylon sleeve of Georgie’s rain slicker tucked into his backpack with only moderate success. Beverly is keeping pace with Bill and he can hear her quietly murmuring to Bill over the water sloshing around Richie’s ankles, so he’s willing to let it go for now.

It takes about an hour to navigate their way out, but only because Eddie directs them to the run-off pipe where they found Betty’s shoe rather than back to the Well House. He’s regained enough strength to walk by then, and he tells Richie as much as they splash through the diluted greywater and into the stream, but Richie elects to ignore him and tramp further into the water instead. “Seriously, Rich, I think I’m good, now. I can walk,” he says as he gently tugs on Richie’s earlobe.

“I think _not_ , Master Kaspbrak!” Richie trills, spinning on the balls of his feet and laughing when Eddie shrieks and clings tighter. “Hurry up, you lot, we haven’t got all day!” he shouts, and when Eddie squints through winking sunlight he grins at the image of his friends slowly trailing out of the pipe. Beverly and Mike have hands raised to shield their eyes from the sun, but all of them - even Bill - are smiling broadly at Richie. “Young Master Kaspbrak requires a dip in Derry’s finest quarry!”

Richie refuses to let Eddie down until they reach the top of the cliff overlooking the quarry, and even then he insists on gingerly setting Eddie on the edge of a rock, hovering anxiously until Eddie slides off the edge of the rock and lands steadily on his feet. “I could probably fly at this point,” he deadpans.

“Aw,” Richie winks, “I _always_ feel like I’m flying when I’m with you, Eddie Spaghetti.”

His heart gives an unfamiliar lurch; he flips Richie off, hoping the odd burning along the tips of his ears will go unnoticed. “Oh, my god, shut _up_ , dude, you are _so_ annoying -”

Mike’s loud whoop cuts him off; Eddie cranes around Richie and grins, catching only a brief flash of Mike’s broad grin as he sprints by and leaps off the edge of the cliff. Stan and Ben follow close behind as Richie cackles, and then Bill edges closer, carefully setting his backpack to one side and toeing his shoes off. He peers up at Richie from beneath his fringe of hair, his grin lopsided. “W-w-wanna do a ch-chicken fight rematch against B-Buh-Ben and S-Stan?”

Richie hooks his thumbs through his belt loops and hunches his shoulders. “You got yerself a pardner, Denbrough,” he drawls.

“Hey, Eddie?” Beverly asks just as Richie turns back and reaches for his hand. They both freeze as Beverly shuffles closer. “Can I - can we talk?”

Eddie blinks at her, and then at Richie’s outstretched hand still hanging in the air between them. “Uh.”

“Just for a minute,” she says, flashing Richie an apologetic grimace. “I just have - questions.”

Slowly, Richie’s fingers curl into his palm, and his hand falls to his side. He takes a half-step backwards; he’s watching Eddie intently when Eddie meets his gaze. “Okay,” Eddie says, and Richie nods, backing away in earnest.

Beverly waits until both Bill and Richie have plummeted over the edge, the loud crash of their bodies plunging beneath the surface loud and echoing off the distant wall of the opposite end of the quarry. She scuffs her toes through the red dirt, gingerly gripping her left forearm with her right hand, and only looks up at Eddie when he plops back down on the rock where Richie deposited him earlier. “So,” he prompts.

“So,” she echoes, nodding slowly. “You feeling better?”

“Yeah. I could -” he stops and closes his eyes, and the breeze that washes his injuries away sends a pleasant shiver down his spine. “C’mere,” he says when he opens his eyes again.

She comes willingly, offering him her arm and sighing when her injuries evaporate. Eddie leans back on his rock, smiling lazily when Beverly shivers, too.

“So,” he says again.

“I don’t really know how to ask this.”

He grimaces, and she mirrors it, tentative and fractured.

“I - I saw things.”

He closes his eyes. Things are piecey at best in his memory between the alley and Richie’s face swimming into focus in the sewers, but the feelings - oh, _god_ , the _feelings_ -

“Do you - you were already - when I woke up down there, you were - uh,” she stops and shakes her head, fingertips briefly pressing to her forehead. “It - It had already - you were floating. Do you remember anything?”

He doesn’t, truthfully - just hazy pain, pressing darkness, harrowing unearthly screams - and oh, oh _fuck_ -

“Lights,” Eddie hears himself rasp, and Beverly pales. “I - there were lights. Three of them.”

She nods. “I saw them, too,” she whispers. “It’s the last thing I remember seeing before - _god_.” She sits heavily, forehead cradled in her hands, breaths coming sharp and shallow. Eddie sinks down beside her automatically and grips her knobby knee - to ground her, to ground himself, to stave off the thick wall of panic unfurling just above their heads. “I saw - _things_ ,” she whispers.

He screws his eyes shut - he saw them, too. _Them_ , Eddie and Beverly and all of their friends, older and wearier but just as scared, creeping through the same thick shadows, their aged faces lit only by dim and flickering flashlights. He hadn’t seen much else, but he’d _felt_ it - the oppressive cold, the sickening, cloying _terror_ choking them all with thin, spindly fingers. “Us,” he whispers, and Beverly lifts her head and whimpers high in her throat. “Older. Back down there.”

“You saw it, too.”

He nods, not trusting his voice.

“Why were we back down there?”

He has a feeling. A deep, dark, nauseating feeling. “I don’t know,” he lies.

She lowers her hands after a moment and presses warmth into his hand still curved over her knee. “I didn’t get a chance to thank you for saving me from my dad,” she murmurs.

He tries not to scoff, but the sound escapes his throat before he can stop it. “Fat lot of fuckin’ good it did,” he mutters bitterly.

“I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but I think I would’ve rather faced the fucking clown,” she sniffs, caressing his knuckles with the pad of her thumb almost forcefully. “They’re both fucked up, but at least - at least I can hate the clown.”

Eddie isn’t sure how to respond to that, but Beverly doesn’t seem to need a response. She lets her gaze drift out past the edge of the cliff, eyes glazing over, and Eddie squeezes her knee as firmly as he dares. “How’d they wake us up, anyways?” he asks after a long moment.

Something like a smile twitches across her face, brief shadows dancing in the shallow dimples in her cheeks. “Uh - I’m not totally sure,” she admits, casting her gaze down to the swirling nonsensical patterns in the dirt. “It was weird, I - it almost felt like - like someone - _kissed_ me. Maybe.”

He thinks of Bill and the way his eyes linger on Beverly when they walk; he thinks of Ben and the pretty, rosy blush that colors his cheek each time Beverly smiles at him. “How do you know someone kissed you?”

“It just kind of felt like it,” she says with a shrug. “Everything was so weird and confusing - I just felt like someone had definitely kissed me. But it was different for you, you - you were up much higher than I was, I think, and you - fell. Richie caught you, or he tried to, but you - it was different. I didn’t see _exactly_ what happened, we were trying to distract the clown while Richie woke you up, and then you were suddenly awake and -”

“Wait, wait,” he interrupts, “I - the clown was still - It was still alive when I woke up?”

She nods slowly. “You fought It,” she says, “and you killed It. You - do you not remember that?”

“The first thing I remember Richie telling me that I killed It, but I couldn’t remember doing that and he just said it was okay, you’re saying I - oh, _fuck_.” He runs his hands through his hair and tugs lightly, ignoring the concerned noise Beverly makes in her throat and the gentle way she tries to pry his wrists back. “I - I did it again, I - but I don’t even remember it this time, last time I could still - _Jesus_ -”

“Hey, hey, relax,” she urges. “Eddie, c’mon, relax. We both went through some serious _shit_ down there, it’s _okay_ if you don’t remember everything right away -”

“It’s not, though, it’s not that I don’t remember it right now, it’s just - it’s a big fucking black void, Bev, there’s _nothing there_ to remember, something - something else was in control that whole time and I don’t have a fuckin’ _clue_ what happened, I could’ve fuckin’ _killed you guys_ -”

“ _Stop it, Eddie,_ ” she snaps, and he clenches his jaw at once. “You were _not_ gonna kill us. It threatened us and you protected us, the same way you protected Mike in the trainyard and me in the alley and in Keene’s and Ben way back in June. Even if you don’t remember it, Eddie, it was still _you._ _None_ of us were scared of you, not even for a second. I don’t think any of us _could_ ever be scared of you.” He exhales slowly, letting the earnestness of her expression and the ferocity with which she holds his wrists sink in. He lets her pull his hands away from his hair and squeezes when she grips them both between them. “You have _always_ protected us,” she says softly.

“I always will,” he says fiercely, every molecule in his body burning with conviction.

Beverly smiles and leans forward, pecking a feather-light kiss to the end of his nose and laughing when he goes cross-eyed trying to watch her. “C’mon,” she says, scrambling to her feet and pulling him up with her. “You’re my chicken fight partner, I’m tired of Richie always calling dibs. I wanna kick all their asses.”

She takes a long stride toward the cliff’s edge, but stops when Eddie pulls his hand from her grasp. “You go first,” he says, gesturing to the cliff. “It’s dangerous for both of us to jump at the same time, y’know.”

She smiles, equal parts fond and exasperated. “You better be right behind me, then,” she says, waiting for him to nod before turning and running in earnest.

He steps closer to the edge, watching her twist gracelessly through the air and hit the water with an almighty splash. Richie, Mike, and Bill all holler with excitement as she thrashes back to the surface, laughing loud and bright and carefree as she swims toward them, ams sweeping over the surface of the water to splash them all in one swoop. Eddie grins in spite of the heaviness still clinging to his heart; “C’mon, Eds!” Richie shouts from down below.

“I’m coming!” he yells back, muffling a giggle as Stan sneaks up behind Richie and dunks him under water. His heart feels full to bursting with overwhelming love, stubborn and insistent in spite of the heaviness. “I’ll always protect you guys,” he whispers, fists clenched tightly.

He lingers just a second longer before leaping off the edge of the cliff.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can honestly say that this chapter tried to eat my soul lol. I apologize for the delay in posting it, in addition to it being the longest thing uhhh ever, I also left my old job, got stranded in frozen tundra Texas with no heat/power/internet for almost a week, and started a new job in the month(-ish) that has passed since my last update. Hopefully I'll be able to get back onto a more regular posting schedule moving forward!
> 
> I would love to hear your thoughts so far, if you'd care to share them!! I'm very excited about what's coming next :)
> 
> As always, please feel free to hit me up on [tumblr](elsaclack.tumblr.com)!

**Author's Note:**

> Title of the fic comes from [Nothing is Safe by clipping.](https://open.spotify.com/track/0h9GGknmbVbyR3RjwrqmcR?si=Ex208MlsRHK54oDr96DbbA)


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